"Some miserably erroneous way" — phonetic approaches to teaching and learning pronunciation

“The pupil reads some word in some miserably erroneous way, the teacher stops him and pronounces the word in, let us assume, the correct way. The pupil tries to imitate that pronunciation, but fails, and thus we have an endless repetition of the same word by the teacher, followed very often on the part of the pupil by an equally endless repetition of nearly the same bad pronunciation as before” Sound familiar? Phonetic approaches to teaching and learning pronunciation aren’t new — the above scenario was described by linguist Otto Jespersen in 1910. Despite this, language classrooms all over the world still too often involve gruelling pronunciation drills. Those learning outside of classroom settings can also struggle to produce certain new linguistic sounds and rely heavily on imitation methods such as shadowing. In this talk we’ll try and revive Jerspersen’s manifesto for phonetics in the classroom by drawing on my experience of providing guided pronunciation training for language teachers and learners. We’ll tackle confusing terms like “soft” or “hard vowels” and look at what does and doesn’t work when it comes to taking a more phonetic approach to pronunciation. This talk draws on experience from a PhD research project on the acquisition of Welsh by adult learners and on my experience teaching Welsh/Swedish learners and training tutors at London's City Literary Institute.