Desperately Seeking a Communicative Approach: English Pronunciation in a Sample of French and Polish Secondary School Textbooks

Abstract

<jats:p>This paper compares the treatment of English pronunciation in school textbooks from France and Poland, in order to see what resources teachers have at their disposal. It is limited to textbooks used at the secondary level of each education system. Recent research has shown that European teachers do not find teaching English pronunciation easy and that many are unsatisfied with their training in relation to teaching pronunciation (Bradford &amp; Kenworthy 1991; Burgess and Spencer 2000; Henderson et al. 2012; Frost and Henderson, 2013; Iivonen, 2005). Textbooks are a widespread resource with the potential to alleviate a lack of extensive pedagogical training. The first part of this paper analyses pronunciation exercises in a representative sample of textbooks from each country. Pronunciation exercises were classified based on the degree to which they mobilize communicative abilities, according to the five categories of a Communicative Framework for teaching pronunciation (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010, p45): Description &amp; analysis, Listening discrimination, Controlled practice, Guided practice, Communicative practice. The first category involves little risk-taking by the learner, usually focusses on form and allows little freedom. At the other end of the spectrum, communicative practice involves a focus on meaning and interaction, with the concomitant greater freedom to make mistakes. The exercises were then analysed to see which segmental and/or prosodic features they favoured and to what extent.</jats:p>

Teaching and Researching the Pronunciation of English

“…Nowadays, in pronunciation-oriented publications worldwide the topdown approach to teaching pronunciation advocated in the 80s by and Pennington (1989), seems to prevail (Szpyra-Kozłowska et al, 2003b;Wrembel, , 2008 in which suprasegments and especially elements of connected speech are regarded as more essential for successful communication than excellence in isolated sounds. In Jones' (1997, p. 104) analysis of some phonetics course-books available in the 90s, it is noticeable that most activities are of the habit-formation type since they are remarkably similar to the audio-lingual texts of the 50s, relying heavily on mechanical drilling of decontextualized words and sentences, and they are not in the least grounded in communication, which was also evidenced by Henderson and Jarosz (2013). In the analysed materials, exercises in elocution, proper rendition of discrete sounds, sounds in words and sentences, minimal pairs, in the form of imitation drills and reading aloud activities, prevail.…”

“…The issues concerned covered: the treatment of pronunciation in materials that are targeted at learners of general English (Szpyra-Kozłowska et al, 2003b;Szymańska-Czaplak, 2006;Henderson and Jarosz, 2013), the role of phonetics in international language exams such as Cambridge, TOEFL and TSE (Szpyra-Kozłowska, 2003), a detailed analysis of the phonetic component in textbooks preparing for these international language exams (Szpyra- Kozłowska et al, 2003a). Szpyra-Kozłowska et al (2003b), who examine pronunciation-oriented tasks in twenty series of course-books, observe that the top-down approach to phonetics is visible in them since it is prosodic elements and linking that are more frequently included in these courses.…”

“…However, what is worrying is the complete redundancy of phonetic aspects in the contemporary sources, which might suggest that a learner's pronunciation should take care of itself with no help from a textbook. Henderson and Jarosz (2013) compare the treatment of English pronunciation in school textbooks aimed at the compulsory levels of the education systems in two countries, France and Poland. They focus on the preferred model accent/accents and on the activities that relate to prosody.…”

Smoothie or Fruit Salad? Learners’ Descriptions of Accents as Windows to Concept Formation

“…It is odd that more students did not mention diphthongs, given that the GOAT diphthong is the most commonly dealt with segmental feature (along with /i:/) in secondary school textbooks in France (Henderson & Jarosz, 2014) and that it is realised differently in these two accents. Similarly, only six out of sixty students noted anything about intonation, tone or pitch (Music) as features to modify in order to imitate one or the other accent, i.e.…”

Untitled

“…In the writer´s words "L2 sounds must not only be heard and imitated (…) but, metaphorically speaking, they should also be seen, touched, tasted, smelled, felt, understood and appropriated, emotionally as well as intellectually, by EFL learners" (Szpyra, 2015: 145). Furthermore, readers may wish to pay special attention to subsection A.3.6 where they can find more than 10 pages on faults that still exist in current EFL textbooks regarding the teaching of pronunciation, thus making an important contribution to previous research on teaching materials and pronunciation (Tergujeff, 2010;Derwing, Diepenbroek and Foote, 2012;Tergujeff, 2013;and Henderson and Jarosz, 2014).…”