I’m teaching ESL to a class of Chinese adults. They are wonderful people, serious, hardworking, and all sorts of other things — a gem of a class.
All of them have university degrees from China and have had several years of learning English. They can read quite well (intermediate/advanced level) and are excellent in grammar, better than most native English speakers.
The problem is in speech. All of them have very bad accents and are hard to understand. They want to improve their spoken English and they know this is what they need. In particular, here in Montreal we deal with French speakers as well as immigrants from everywhere, so clear speech is a must.
All but one are very recent immigrants, from six months to one month here. The other one has been here for years but has worked mostly with Chinese people and has not improved his speech.
I have tried having them read connected text aloud, read questions and answers aloud, try role-plays, make presentations, and discuss open-ended questions; I have given pronunciation exercises of minimal pairs and sets such as wag-rag-lag-nag; I have corrected speech and asked them to repeat after me; and I have broken words into syllables and had people copy me orally.
They all do everything they are asked, very quickly and intelligently. They all agree that they very much want to improve their speech. But it just isn’t connecting from their knowledge and desire to their habits.
I noticed last class that they do not spell words orally and they do not pay much attention to the letter pattern in words. Yet they all spell very well. I have been trying to stress paying attention to the consonants in words and to pronounce all of them distinctly, because this is the major pronunciation problem here, a slurring and dropping and softening of consonants. They all nod and agree and still haven’t found a way to change their habits.
I know people can and do lose or at least reduce accents — any suggestions for a way to ease and speed up this process?
maybe a speech therapist
Well, no. I have studied the formation of English sounds in my linguistics classes, and can tell the students about it; and in fact one of them had an English teacher previously who must have gone into a lot of detail because she remembers technical linguistic vocabulary that I have forgotten. The problem isn’t knowing *about* sounds, it’s *using* them.
Maybe a speech therapist.
Re: maybe a speech therapist
A speech therapist may help but if you have a background in linguistics, you can do a lot. I volunteer one evening a week in an ESL class, all Hispanic. One of the tasks the teacher has me do (because of my first grade teaching experience) is to work on enunciation. I try to teach them sounds they don’t have in their native language, i.e. \th\ both voiced and non-voiced, \z, \v\ (they say \b\), etc. I teach them where to place their teeth, lips, and tongue in order to pronounce the sounds. I also teach them to put one hand on the throat to feel the vibration as they differentiate between voiced and non-voiced pairs (\f, \v\). I’m fortunate because we can all laugh a lot over the silly mouth contortions but it seems to help. We work on number words such as three, thirty, fourth, fifth, etc. It will take them a long time to adjust their speaking even as Europeans spoke with heavy native accents in earlier generations.
Yes a speech therapist is who they should see.
There are SLP’s who make a living in accent reduction. That is who they should be going to. It is how they are forming the sounds in their mouth and the tonal patterns they are using. It is very difficult for ESL speakers to break the habit of their mother tongue when they are learning english as adults.
Re: Yes a speech therapist is who they should see.
ALSO some of the language teaching companies (ie berlitz) have experts who work with executives — I worked in HR in a large japanese multi-national before my primary career became Mom — they had a specialist come out to get newly transferred execs speaking legibly — it is even harder for Japanese, I was told at the time…
I wonder if you might, being an ESL teacher for people who couldn’t possibly afford Berlitz services in this area, get some help in techniques from someone there? Just a thought…you may find an SLP is more forthcoming…best wishes, anyone who has you for a teacher is in good hands!
Re: A question for all you English teachers
I had to smile- this makes me think of Pygmalion- or more specifically My Fair Lady:) How about plays and poetry- something where they have to rehearse to recite- and the rehearsal materials could be taped with exagerated diction instead of being reading material? They could listen to each other and the tape and evaluate themselves… you must have some folks who have figured out some of the sounds and might have hints on how to do it for the rest. The Speech Therapist suggestion is a good one- you could do it from a consult I bet. The other thing might be to talk with a language teacher at one of the bilingual schools- they may have some good thoughts too since this an issue for them daily.
Robin
Re: A question for all you English teachers
I like the idea of working from a speech therapy angle. If this is something that you need to do yourself without having a speech therapist they can work with or you can learn from yourself, you might want to look at the Lindamood-Bell LIPS program. An important element of the program has a speech therapy basis to it. That would be the only part of it you’d need to learn. Perhaps you could buy the LIPS book to learn how they present the sounds to students?
Basically, they teach people how their mouths work when they make sounds. To give you an idea, this is how some of the consonants are paired:
These are some examples that are paired according to voiced and unvoiced sounds: p/b, t/d, k/g, s/z, ch/j
Some other consonants are grouped together based on where the tongue is placed (very important for your Chinese students) - l is called a front lifter, r a back lifter because that’s where you lift your tongue to voice that sound. w/h/wh are “windy sounds”, m/n/ng are “nose sounds” because the only way we can make them is to have the air push through our noses (try plugging your nose and saying these sounds). The students are taught where to place their tongues while making these sounds.
The vowels are taught based on what’s called the “vowel circle” and again, there are face pictures to represent how our mouth moves, what part is “working when we make this sound” and they’re sorted into categories.
I think this might be an easier way to approach the speech therapy end of it because it uses simple language to show and explain how to produce sounds. The terms are descriptive so someone with a limited vocabulary should be able to understand them fine.
I don’t have an answer — but I wonder if a person who teaches singing might. In my chorus classes we are often instructed in precisely how to hold our mouths to make vowels and consonants sound certain ways, and I understand that more serious singers do all kinds of stuff to get accents right for singing other languages.
I am in a choir that is all (except for me) Korean. I have modified my accent so that I can blend with them (and for the challenge of being able to do it). Many of them are music majors, yet for the most part they are unable to say some of our phonemes (such as “th”). I don’t know how much they’ve tried (if you’re a piano major, perhaps you aren’t pressured to get your singing that perfect).