to the contrasting information produced when learners compare what they would and would not do in various situations.
Integrating Pronunciation with Textbook Materials
Even the most creative teachers do much of their teaching with textbooks and other published and unpublished materials. The use of such materials provides a curriculum to follow, activities to choose from, and a visible focus for language learning that is shared by everyone in the class. Textbooks, however, are designed to prioritize certain skills depending on the proficiency levels of the learners, the requirements of governmental boards or pedagogical decision makers, or many other constraints. Even the best integrated-skills textbooks emphasize some skills more than others. Pronunciation skills are among the least emphasized skills in most published materials (Levis & Sonsaat, 2016), and teachers who want to integrate pronunciation into their lessons need to understand where pronunciation fits best. Fortunately, it almost always fits.
The first example (Figure 2.1), from a basic ABE class text called What’s Next (Conklin, 2011), looks at challenges faced by new immigrants or refugees in addressing problems with housing. The page excerpted here shows a fill-in-the-blank exercise with a word bank, which is meant to build sight word recognition with the housing-based vocabulary introduced in the unit. These types of fill-in-the-blank or cloze activities are common in all levels of English language classes. We suggest that teachers use these standard vocabulary building activities as opportunities to integrate lexical stress activities that require minimal preparation and are useful for learners to develop an awareness of syllables and begin to notice stress patterns. Lexical stress is both relatively easy to teach and important for intelligibility (Dalton & Seidlhofer, 1994; Levis, 2018). These types of activities can easily become routines for introducing and teaching any new vocabulary. In addition, we suggest that teachers use the commas in sentences two through five to highlight the function of thought groups and connections to punctuation. Even though punctuation is not consistently connected to pronunciation (Allen, 1971), at a basic level it is useful to call attention to the ways that written language signals pronunciation.
Figure 2.1 Possible pronunciation features in a fill-in-the-blank activity.
The second example is from Ventures, Level 4 (Bitterlin, 2018), a higher-level integrated skills textbook often used in ABE classrooms. The focus of this exercise is the difference between -ing and -ed participial adjectives (e.g., I’m bored vs. I’m boring). This is a topic with both grammatical and semantic differences that are challenging at high/intermediate proficiency levels, but the lesson also has several pronunciation features. First, it offers a chance to continue to call attention to stress in the pronunciation of multisyllabic words, showing how words with different suffixes can be pronounced with the same stress patterns. (In other cases, suffixes are associated with different stress patterns, e.g., PHOtograph, phoTOgraphy, photoGRAPHic.) In addition, the two participial suffixes in this exercise have systematically variable pronunciations. The -ing suffix variations have strong sociolinguistic differences, and -ing can be pronounced as [ɪn] (walkin’) or as [ɪŋ] (walking). Research has shown that all speakers typically use both pronunciations in some situations, but the [ɪŋ] pronunciation is judged as being more correct, more formal, more educated, and associated with higher social classes. [ɪn], on the other hand, is more common in casual speech and is more likely to be heard in the speech of younger people (e.g., Babcock, 2014).
The other pronunciation variation is found in the -ed suffix (occurring mostly on verbs), which can be pronounced with either a full syllable when the base word ends in [t] or [d] (as in depended) or as simply an extra [t] or [d] sound (as in shocked, failed) if the base word ends in any other sound. (The wrong pronunciation of these short endings can confuse listeners, since adding an extra syllable will make words like shocked sound like shock it.) It is good for learners to know that there are patterns and that the final sounds in these words are important to pronounce because of the meaning they carry.
A teacher integrating pronunciation into these textbook lessons can choose to do as little or as much as needed, but we offer the suggestions in Figure 2.2 as examples where pronunciation is clearly connected to the primary target of a textbook activity focused on other skills. The accurate use of both past and present participial adjectives is important to spoken language, and the variant pronunciations and their meanings for the participial endings are things language learners will need to be able to interpret in the spoken language of others as well as communicate their own intended meanings.
Figure 2.2 Pronunciation and the learning of participial adjectives.
Conclusion
We have offered several reasons for integrating pronunciation into language teaching. Integration ensures that pronunciation is addressed consistently, and attending to pronunciation’s forms and functions as part of instruction focusing on other skills will not only improve the ways that language learners speak and listen, it will also ensure that they learn oral and written language as complementary representations of communicative ability. We have also suggested how to research the effectiveness of integrating pronunciation. Finally, we encourage teachers to include pronunciation in their own teaching by providing examples in an ABE context, of how pronunciation can be integrated into challenging teaching situations. Using examples like these for teacher training or development would be valuable to help new and practicing teachers see how pronunciation fits naturally within the teaching of other skills.
Practical Resources for Pedagogy and Research
Darcy, I., Rocca, B., & Hancock, Z. (2021). A window into the classroom: how teachers integrate pronunciation instruction. RELC Journal, 52(1), 110–127. https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688220964269
Presents a corpus of 110 hours of ESL teaching to demonstrate how much pronunciation is and is not integrated into instruction when teachers explicitly plan to do so or only address pronunciation reactively.
Jones, T. (Ed.). (2016). Pronunciation in the classroom: The overlooked essential. Alexandria, VA: TESOL Press.
An accessible book explaining and demonstrating a variety of practical techniques for integrating pronunciation with particular skill areas such as conversation and reading.
Massachusetts English Language Proficiency Standards for Adult Education, 2019. Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Adult and Community Learning Services. https://www.doe.mass.edu/acls/frameworks/elps.pdf
A rubric demonstrating how pronunciation skills can be incorporated into state-wide curricular decisions.
Munro, M. J., & Derwing, T. M. (2020). Collecting data in L2 pronunciation research. In O. Kang, S. Staples, K. Yaw, & K. Hirschi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching conference (pp. 8–18). ISSN 2380-9566. Northern Arizona University, September 2019. Ames, IA: Iowa State University.
For teachers and researchers
