Teorias De Fraser And Gilbert

“Gilbert and Frasers theories”

Gilbert

Second language learners struggle with hearing intonation well as they focus on trying to understand different sounds, word meaning and grammar

The kazoo as the best tool a pronunciation teacher can have to developing students’ awareness of intonation patterns in English can be augmented by providing auditory cues. By humming the word shape into the kazoo, students can hear the intonation pattern of the syllables without worrying about the sounds.

Without a sufficient, threshold-level mastery of the English prosodic system, learners’ intelligibility and listening comprehension will not advance, no matter how much effort is made drilling individual sounds. That is why the highest priority must be given to rhythm and melody in whatever time is available for teaching pronunciation. If there is more time, then other lower priority topics can be addressed (e.g., the sound of the letters th, the difference between the sounds associated with r and l, etc.), but priority must be given to prosody.

Teachers are often hesitant to tackle rhythm and melody in class because these topics are perceived as complicated and full of nuance. Textbooks on the subject tend to be intimidating because they present so many rules. However, while intonation analysis can get very complicated, teaching a threshold level of understanding of the core system is actually quite simple at its most basic level.

If there is only time to teach awareness of the core system and practice these vital rhythmic and melodic cues, as well as certain critical sounds (e.g., the grammar cues at the end of words), students will have achieved a great deal of communicative competence. But if these prosodic cues are not taught, then efforts at achieving communicative competence by drilling individual sounds will prove frustrating. After all, practicing pronunciation by focusing only on individual sounds is like using only part of the language. As one teacher trainee put it after training course, “Practicing pronunciation without prosody is like teaching ballroom dancing, only the students must stand still, practice without a partner, and without music.”

The traditional pronunciation training usually focuses on minimal-pair drilling of vowel and consonant sounds, concentrating on individual sounds that are hard for students to hear or produce, in the hopes of achieving “mastery of the English sound system.” Unfortunately, this kind of drilling often produces depressing results and tends to take up a great deal of available classroom time. We have considered an approach to teaching individual English sounds that takes into consideration the larger prosodic framework of spoken English and sets some priorities for which sounds should be addressed first, and how. It is terribly inefficient to teach individual sounds without establishing some basic understanding of the English system of rhythm and melody. For one thing, without an understanding of English prosody, students will end up practicing English sounds in their L1 rhythm. This is a common problem in many ESL/ELT classrooms. The rhythmic structure of each language supplies a timing context that makes it easier to reach the target sound. So, learning about the L2’s rhythm will make it easier for students to pronounce L2 sounds. Conversely, not learning about the target L2 rhythm will make the task more difficult. It has been said, for instance, that it is hard to make clear Spanish consonants if you are speaking in a Portuguese rhythm. So rhythm training is a precondition to good, clear target sounds.

In the exercise of pronunciation the main is use as many visual, kinesthetic, and auditory tools as you can, and to encourage the most realistic interactive use possible of the components of the Prosody Pyramid. All these parts of pronunciation work together to make a speaker comfortably intelligible. Students who gain confidence through practice with “listener-friendly pronunciation” will find English an easier pathway to whatever goals they want to achieve with the language.

Typical practice activities include listening discrimination, pair work, dictation, kinesthetic tasks, ‘music of English’ which aims to develop a feel for the sounds of English, and ‘quality repetition’ which focuses on choral repetition with the teacher.

Fraser

Apply the theory of Cognitive Phonology to pronunciation teaching and learning.

The particular importance is the role of categories, concepts and concept formation. Learning the concepts of the L2 phonology is a prerequisite to successfully categorising the sounds of the language.

The crucial implication for learning L2 pronunciation is that ‘If pronunciation is behaviour, and behaviour is driven by concepts, then the key to changing pronunciation is changing concepts’ (Fraser 2006a:87).

This approach has led to the proposal of a number of practical suggestions for pronunciation teaching (Fraser 2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2006a). These take as a starting point the observation that L2 pronunciation is a cognitive skill, and the greatest difficulties in learning it are cognitive rather than physical.

The need to, ‘strive to communicate information about speech in a way learners can use effectively to improve their pronunciation. This is the key to good metalinguistic communication’

Critical Listening is one of the central tenets of a concept formation approach as developed. It is based on the principle that ‘Learners need to listen often to their own speech, with guidance as to good and bad aspects’.

Fraser (2000a) explains that being able to speak English includes a number of sub-skills of which pronunciation is by far the most important (other sub-skills of speaking include vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatics). She argues that “with good pronunciation, a speaker is intelligible despite other errors; with poor pronunciation, understanding a speaker will be very difficult, despite accuracy in other areas” (Fraser, 2000a, p. 7). In spite of its importance, the teaching of pronunciation has been neglected by teachers in the field of English language teaching.

Methods and

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