Week 3: Developing aural/oral skills

As my colleagues have already mentioned, the further we go the tougher it gets. However, although this week's task occupied most of my time, I had a feeling that I fulfilled my requirements with more vigour and zeal than before.

Besides Delicious, we were given a number of readings on teaching listening, speaking and pronunciation along with several websites to explore. The most interesting moment for me was to compare how approaches to teaching pronunciation have changed over the years. In Teaching Listening Comprehension P. Ur (1984) argues that teachers should sensitize students to the existence of notions such as rhythm, stress and intonation, but not go further than that. In her opinion, teaching these patterns is completely unpredictable as they are idiosyncratic and thus too varied to have true value in teaching pronunciation.

On the other hand, M.G. Busà in her New Perspectives In Teaching Pronunciation, claims that a more balanced approach to teaching pronunciation has been adopted over the recent years, with a stronger emphasis on prosody. Busà argues that this significant shift occured because of technology and the development of a variety of speech recognition systems.

Teachers nowadays have access to an array of web-based resources that they can use with their students to practise pronunciation. There is no need, however, to completely eliminate a foreign accent, but the fact that a particular accent can be acquired is unquestionable, as seen in this video, where actress Amy Walker repeats one and the same sentence in 21 different accents.





You might also be intersted in The Speech Accent Archive, a project run by the faculty of the George Mason University.