16th Educational Conference Melbourne 2003

Productive Skills in the Academic English Curriculum

Germana ECKERT, Insearch Language Centre
This paper first gives reasons why pronunciation work may be pushed aside in academic English syllabi and shows examples of the result of less than adequate emphasis and instruction of pronunciation on the students. The paper then gives practical examples of how pronunciation can be integrated into the academic English syllabus. I have found the pronunciation exercises presented here to be useful and beneficial to students and hopefully teachers will be able to take some ideas away from this paper to use in their classes.

INTRODUCTION
I believe that the style of presentation of pronunciation elements presented here convinces students that pronunciation skills are achievable and that they are worth attaining. Furthermore, it sensitizes students to features of pronunciation and therefore improves their listening comprehension skills in their Academic English courses. Once students are aware of the features and elements of pronunciation, teachers can start to encourage students to produce these elements of pronunciation. You might call this passive learning: Students first learn to recognise elements of pronunciation, and after achieving this, they can begin to attempt to produce those elements. The academic texts used as examples and referred to in this paper are all spoken texts. Students would encounter these texts first in listening skills lessons which practise students note-taking skills. The main focus in most current academic English curriculum may leave little room for pronunciation work. There are two important reasons for this. The first is the importance of good writing ability in academic English. Students quickly learn that writing is considered more important than other skills as it is weighted more in most tertiary institutions in Australia. Also, teachers tend to spend more time working on students writing and grammar skills, as this productive skill is often not as strong as students speaking skills. In addition, teachers tend to ask more from students in their writing than in their spoken skills. Teachers therefore may often spend more time on students writing and grammar skills in order that students be best prepared for exams, and especially writing exams, which lead to entry to tertiary study. The time factor is the second important factor which causes students and teachers to leave little time for pronunciation work in the academic English classroom. Students are almost always in a hurry to get to their next step, be it university or other tertiary study. Students all too often regard this as the real reason they came to study here, often failing to see the link between strong English skills and success at the tertiary level. Therefore, they are often in a hurry to finish their English studies and start their tertiary studies.

PRONUNCIATION
The result of less than adequate emphasis on and instruction of pronunciation is often to the longterm detriment of students pronunciation skills. This can be seen in the high-level academic English seminar presentation. It is heartbreaking to see an advanced level academic English student present a seminar which is excellent in terms of content, research and visual aids, but which neither the teacher nor the students can understand because the students pronunciation is so unclear as to render the presentation not understandable. This is too often the case.

English Australia

16th Educational Conference Melbourne 2003

When advanced academic students presentations are recorded and the tape played back, students often comment that their presentation is boring and difficult to follow, as conventional pronunciation elements such as intonation, rhythm, and stress used to signal keywords may not always be used to convey meaning. Students also need to be able to be aware of and use prosodic and phonemic aspects of the language well when speaking to native speakers at university. Being unaware of these prosodic elements could be to their detriment. International students may seem rude if they are not following the common pronunciation rules of English when speaking to native English speakers. By the time students are studying in an advanced level academic class, students pronunciation errors are often fossilized and it is difficult and sometimes almost impossible for students to overcome fossilized errors. Selinker (1972) in Ellis says that most learners will never achieve their target language competence. By this, he explains, the learners internalized rule system for the language differs from the rules in the target language. This occurrence is known as fossilization. Lightbown and Spada (1996:.80) state that `allowing learners too much freedom without correction and explicit instruction will lead to early fossilization of errors. Once again we hear the call for making sure learners get it right from the beginning and that `language is not learned by the gradual accumulation of one item after another. Nunan (2001) describes the complexity of the process of second language acquisition as an organic rather than linear process. Therefore we need to start pronunciation lessons early and continue through to high-level Academic English levels. In this way we can demonstrate to students that good pronunciation is achievable. The example course used for this paper is an upper-intermediate level Academic English class where students are grappling with academic, nominalised, authentic or semi- authentic texts, which contain examples of complex sentence structures, abstract ideas and advanced lexis. Students can enter this level with an IELTS of 5 overall with a 5 in writing and a 5.5 in reading. The example Pronunciation Strand Overview can be seen in figure 1.1 Pronunciation Focus Problem Consonants Words with similar vowel sounds The sound /:/ The sound /a:/ Upper- Intermediate English rhythm: squeezing and stretching words Rhythm patterns Script: Interview with Bronwyn Linking: making new sounds Using focus stress in conversation Pitch change in focus words Tones Intonation Language Chants Linking: consonant + consonant Shifting Stress Figure 1.1 Text Headway Elementary Pronunciation Headway Elementary Pronunciation Headway Intermediate Pronunciation Ship or Sheep? In Tempo In Tempo Coffee break In Tempo In Tempo In Tempo Pronunciation Tasks Headway Intermediate Pronunciation Australian Language Chants Pronunciation Tasks Headway Intermediate Pronunciation

English Australia

16th Educational Conference Melbourne 2003

While some may find the use of elementary texts in an upper- intermediate academic English class questionable, these texts are essential in the development and analysis of elements of pronunciation. When presenting any new vocabulary or grammar point for analysis, teachers explain and present in the simplest way in order to achieve clarity for students. The same method applies for the presentation of new elements of pronunciation. However, after presenting vocabulary and grammar in a simple way, that specific lexis or grammatical structure is transposed into the more complex academic text. This is not often done with pronunciation elements. Teachers could reuse academic, authentic, contextualised texts and analyse them first for their lexis, then their grammatical features, then for the students understanding of the concepts within the text. The same text could then be used to teach elements of pronunciation. This would show students an explicit link between pronunciation and their Academic English studies and also save time in the academic English class. In addition, students would not be overloaded with texts, as they would not have to grapple with new texts containing new vocabulary and examples of grammatical structures. Through this explicit link, students would be able to see the value of pronunciation outside the pronunciation lesson. They would see that good pronunciation is worth attaining. The integration of pronunciation elements should start at the lower levels and continue right through to the advanced levels of Academic English. If this is done, students would see that pronunciation is not only worth attaining but also achievable. In addition, the teaching of pronunciation could become more indirect. Until now, we have discussed the possibility of using these elementary and intermediate publications to introduce new elements of pronunciation. Teachers and students could also analyse a text for pronunciation elements after it is analysed for its lexis and grammar, but before any explicit presentation of pronunciation elements is done in class. Laroy states that the oblique approach to teaching pronunciation can sometimes be the most effective. `Much of the teaching and improvement of pronunciation should be indirect. teachers need to know what they are teaching, but the learners need not always be aware of what they are learning. This will not only avoid arousing immediate resistance, but can also reduce selfconsciousness. This approach on its own is very often enough to produce considerable improvement, or at least create a state of mind where the learners can benefit from other pronunciation work. If you are going to give explicit explanation and correction, it should be when students can really benefit from it. If the students ask for explanation, it probably means they are ready for some analysis. This may be the time to provide descriptions of the intonational system or the position of the speech organs for certain sounds, or to do traditional activities such as minimal pair practice (1995:8-9). The oblique approach may also be useful to clearly demonstrate to students the way prosodic and phonemic elements of English pronunciation are interlinked.

EXAMPLE ACTIVITIES
Figure 1.2 shows an example paragraph from this upper- intermediate academic English class. Students would first encounter this text in an academic English lesson focusing on listening and note-taking skills. As we know, the term multinational is used for a company which has subsidiaries or sales facilities throughout the world. We can also call these businesses global corporations. Companies like General Motors, IBM, Proctor and Gamble and Cadbury are all global corporations. They control enormous amounts of money and operate in countries with varying political and economic systems. Concerns have been raised about the activities of multinationals, particularly in the areas of the economy, English Australia political power, and employment.

16th Educational Conference Melbourne 2003

Example academic text: Figure 1.2 After the complete text has been analysed by the class for new lexis, grammar and the message conveyed by the text, and after the students have completed the listening and note- taking lesson, this first paragraph of the text could be analysed in terms of phonemic and prosodic features of the text. For teachers who are not very confident teaching pronunciation lessons, a good starting point is to analyse the text and select several sounds which occur in the text. For example, in this paragraph there are examples of the diphthongs /au/ and /ou/. To introduce these two diphthongs, teachers could play the sound game: Divide the class into two groups. Ask the two groups to come to the front of the room around the teachers desk. Ask the two groups to nominate a representative who will begin. Put an A3 paper such as the example in figure 1.3 onto the teachers desk and give the two representatives a rolled up newspaper each.

/aU/
Figure 1.3

/oU/

Explain that you will read out a selection of words and that the first group representative to point to the correct phonemic symbol gets a point. Each representative has three turns before conceding to another team member. Read out the words from a minimal pairs activity. Begin to read out more complex words from a text the students have studied in the Academic English syllabus. The group with the most points wins.

After the sound game, put students into pairs and give each pair an A3 page with a phonemic symbol written at the top of the page. Each pair should get a page with a different phonemic symbol.

/aU/

/oU/

Give the pairs a copy of the example academic text you wish to use.

English Australia

16th Educational Conference Melbourne 2003

Ask each pair to read the text and write down every word in the text that contains the phonemic symbol they have on their blank page. Ask the students to write down each word from the text which contains that phonemic symbol. Students should underline the part of the word where that phonemic sound occurs. For these two diphthongs, and using the text in figure 1.2, students would complete the activity as shown below:

/aU/

/oU/

throughout know amounts also about global Motors power Next, put all the A3 pages shown above around the walls of the classroom and encourage global students to check their peers work.

Invariably, some words will be included on more than one page, and students will then need to negotiate with other pairs to decide which pair is correct in including that word. For example, if the pair who analysed the text for the /au/ sound had also written the word know, then those students would need to negotiate with the pair who analysed the text for the /ou/ sound in order to discover which pair is correct. This activity allows students to analyse an academic text for phonemic sounds in a communicative way. It is also a good activity for teachers who do not feel confident about teaching pronunciation. If well prepared, teachers can limit the amount of spontaneous pronunciation analysis needed in the classroom. It is recommended that if a text is analysed for occurrences of the schwa sound, this be done as a whole- class activity. After this analysis, the text could next be analysed and used to practise rhythm and stress in English speech:

As we know, the term multinational is used for a company which has subsidiaries or sales facilities throughout the world. We can also call these businesses global corporations. Companies like General Motors, IBM, Proctor and Gamble and Cadbury are all global corporations. They control enormous amounts of money and operate in countries with varying political and economic systems. Concerns have been raised about the activities of multinationals, particularly in the areas of the economy, political power, and employment.

The text can also be used to practice /j/ and (same and different) Consonant-Consonant linking:

As we know, the term multinational is used for a company which has subsidiaries or sales facilities throughout the world. We can also call these businesses global corporations. Companies like General Motors, IBM, Proctor and Gamble and Cadbury are all global corporations. They control enormous amounts of money and operate in countries with varying political and economic systems. Concerns have been raised about the activities of multinationals, particularly in the areas of the economy, political power, and employment. English Australia

16th Educational Conference Melbourne 2003

To use this method of integrating pronunciation into academic English curriculum, first decide on the element of pronunciation you wish to cover in class either because it is programmed into the syllabus or because you have noticed students are having difficulty with particular elements. Next, review texts in the academic English syllabus to find which has the most occurrences of that particular element of pronunciation or demonstrates the pronunciation element most clearly. Finally, introduce the element of pronunciation at some time after you have reviewed the text for its lexis, grammatical structure and meaning. One text or excerpt from a text can be analysed for more than one element of pronunciation. The three examples shown in this paper (phonemes, rhythm and stress, and linking) could be used over 3 weeks. The analysis and practice for each would take approximately 25 to 30 minutes of class time. Texts can be analysed for elements such as linking, phonemes and minimal pairs, rhythm in speech, intonation, syllable stress in multi- syllable words, shifting stress and focus stress in dialogues or presentations, use of pauses for stress and tones.

CONCLUSION
Clement Laroy (1995) states `A person will only want something if they believe it is achievable and worth attaining because of the benefits it will bring. I believe teachers can show their students that good pronunciation is achievable if starting from the lower levels of the academic English curriculum and continuing to the highest levels of academic English students are taught to analyse text for pronunciation as well as lexical and grammatical features. Teachers can show students that good pronunciation is worth attaining if there is an explicit link between elements of pronunciation and the academic text. If teachers are able to achieve this, then the students will want it. I have found these activities useful in integrating pronunciation in the academic English syllabus. I believe that this style of presentation of pronunciation materials convinces students that pronunciation skills are achievable and that they are worth attaining. Furthermore, it sensitizes students to features of pronunciation and therefore improves their listening comprehension skills in their Academic English course. Lastly, this passive style of pronunciation learning encourages students to first become aware of the features and elements of pronunciation, after which teachers can start to encourage these students to produce these elements of pronunciation.

REFERENCES
Carter, R and Nunan, D. (Eds). (2001). The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. CUP: Cambridge Ellis, R (1985). Understanding Second Language Acquisition. OUP: Oxford. Laroy, C. (1995). Pronunciation. OUP: Hong Kong. Lightbown, P. and Spada, N. (1996). How Languages are Learned. OUP: Oxford Pennington, M. (1994). Recent research in L2 phonology: Implications for practice, in Pronunciation Pedagogy and Theory, (Ed.) J. Morley, TESOL, Alexandria, pp 94-108. Selinker, L., in Ellis, R. (1985). Understanding Second language Acquisition. OUP: Oxford.

English Australia