Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
THINK OR SINK.
Antolina García Carrascal
Universidad de Oviedo
Spain
Phone: 34 985104539
Fax: 34 985104555
E-mail: agc@uniovi.es
Abstract
Phonetics is the word that gives any learner of English the shivers. Pronunciation, the
unfinished business for most speakers of English as a second language. When it comes
to Maritime English, things do not get any easier. To every problem present in the
foreign language classroom, we must add those particular of this discipline, such as
lack of teaching time, huge range of subject matter, diversity of instructors’ profiles,
students’ levels, materials, etc.
This paper aims at presenting some clues as to how to introduce and use phonetics in
the Maritime English classroom by, first, raising awareness of differences and
similarities between the pronunciation of English and learner’s L1 (contrastive
phonetics) and, second, introducing the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as a
tool for classroom and autonomous use.
Key words: Pronunciation instruction, English phonetics, Maritime English, English for
Specific Purposes
1 Introduction
The aim of this paper is to present a series of tasks that help introduce the teaching of English
phonology and phonetics, i.e., English pronunciation, in the Maritime English classroom.
These tasks are geared towards the needs of a specific group of learners (adult native speakers
of Spanish with some previous knowledge of English) but I believe and hope some of the
issues they address can be useful to learners of other nationalities.
I will start by talking about what led me to choose the learning objectives for these
introductory lessons to English phonetics. Next, I will present and discuss the tasks selected,
which deal with, first, phonemic transcription, second, word stress placement and third, stress
in connected speech. Finally, I will mention some of the outcomes resulting from this
proposal and practice.
2 Teaching context
The tasks aim at introducing English pronunciation in about 10 hours’ instruction. The target
audience are, on the one hand, 1st year students taking their marine engineering and nautical
degrees at the Escuela Superior de la Marina Civil (Universidad de Oviedo). These 10 hours
are distributed along the academic year, in their respective subjects, rather than taught as one
solid unit at a specific time in the year.
On the other hand I also use these activities in a ten-hour phonetic module as part of an
introductory course to Standard Maritime English, financed by the European Social Fund
within the Perseus Program, and imparted at the Centro de Seguridad Marítima Integral
Jovellanos (Maritime Safety Training Centre Jovellanos). In both cases the tasks are virtually
the same but, of course, each context and students / trainees occasionally demand some
adjustments.
p t k f s T S tS
b d g v z D Z dZ
h l r w m n N j
I i: u: U eI I@ @U
@ 3: O: Q aI e@ aU
e & A: V OI U@
Look at the sounds underlined in the words below. Put the words under the
correct symbol for that sound
helm wide this target mark change jettison long moor measure
sea port beach ship rig line rain wind you air
full miles deck fire move ice think data anchor vessel
pan tow course fog oar tug give search bay not
foul hold oil veer
/dZVst f@ fVn/
-Which words do the following -Transcribe the following words
transcriptions represent?
• /"deIndZ@r@s/ • pilot
• /rI"kwest/ • launch
• /rVf/ • starboard
• /"SIpjA:d/ • damage
• /p@"zISn/ • available
5 Word stress
In order to tackle stress I decided to focus on two main difficulties the Spanish learner of
English has. The first of them is linked to language typology: English is a Germanic language,
and Spanish is a Romance language. Therefore, stress assignment in both language branches
differs dramatically 6 but students systematically apply their Romance / Spanish stress-pattern
to any words they don’t know but look familiar. Thus, a word such as purpose /"p3:p@s/,
becomes purpose */pur"pous/. In this respect I propose a simple rule to follow:
“if it looks like Spanish, it won’t be pronounced the Spanish way”
We, then, try displacing stress as far left in the word as possible, taking into consideration that
English accent is so ‘powerful’ that in many cases the rest of syllables are reduced to having a
very weak vowel sound (‘schwa’ mostly), despite misleading orthographies.
In order to do some practice, we first try to prove our rule:
1: Try and pronounce the following words. Which is the stressed syllable in each one of them?
natural interesting courage purpose
Then we apply it to some specific vocabulary:
2: Now apply the ‘leftmost rule’ to the following terms. Mark the syllables that contain /@/.
engine turbine measurement temperature forecastle
Finally we start developing the rule further by adding some ‘new rules’:
“suffixes such as -age -able -ous never carry stress and contain very weak vowels”
3: Choose the weak vowel (/@/ or /I/) that corresponds to each of the suffixes in the words
below. Mark the stressed syllable on each of the terms and try and pronounce the words.
comfortable floodable leakage buoyage serious anxious
Once again we pay special attention to the production of the weak syllables by pointing out to
their lack of stress and their good chance of containing a /@/ sound in them. As a rounding up
of the topic, we comment on the characteristic rhythmical pattern achieved by the alternation
of stressed / unstressed syllables. We also mention the fact that English stressed syllables tend
to be very prominent as compared to the unstressed ones, which seem to be uttered at high
speed and perceived as an indistinct whisper. This characteristic rhythmical pattern spreads
beyond the word boundary and passes on to connected speech where alternation is maintained
further by means of the weak forms.
6 Stress in connected speech: weak forms
No attempt whatsoever is made at making students learn the full list of English weak forms by
heart. As in the exercises above, emphasis is placed on raising awareness about differences
and trying to find some initial solutions to the difficulties these differences pose. In order to
introduce this topic we talk about the tendency of English speech to move from stressed
syllable to stressed syllable tip-toeing over unstressed ones, and how words which convey
meaning (‘lexical’ words) tend to be more prominent than those which hold the structure of
the sentence (‘function’ words.)
We, then, do some traditional rhythm exercises with a view to, once again, putting theory into
practice. We apply the division lexical / function words to speech, and check whether the
rhythmical pattern achieved would, anyhow, resemble the native pace which puzzled us so
much at the beginning of the course / module.
a. Assign a maximum of two stresses to each sentence, then pronounce the sentences going
from stress to stress and obscuring weak syllables.
the fish jumped
the fisherman jumped
the fisherman was jumping
the fisherman had been jumping
1
I am aware of the fact that the notion of ‘stress-timing’ falls very short of a comprehensive description of
English rhythm. For comments on this, Gimson and Cruttenden (1994: 226-7) and Roach (1991: 120-3).
2
I use British English RP Standard as reference.
3
No phonemic account of English can go without a description, explanation and practice of its segments, but for
such a short introduction to English phonetics I find this approach much more useful.
4
I use ‘stress’ and ‘accent’ indistinctively to refer to the most prominent syllable of a word.
5
“Despite the fact that an English listener will tend to interpret a distorted sound or accentual pattern […] in
terms of his own (correct) pattern […], it may nevertheless happen that a word pronounced with the correct
sound sequence may be misunderstood if the relative prominence of the syllables is incorrect.” Gimson and
Cruttenden, (1994: 215-6).
6
Whereas Germanic languages assign stress beginning at the left end of the word, Romance languages start at
the right periphery of the word. For a more detailed account see, for instance, Lass (1997: 77).
7
Despite not being exactly the same thing, it may be worthwhile recalling here contractions as orthographic
evidence of other elision processes in English.
References
Bowler, B. and Parminter, S. (1992). Headway Preintermediate. Pronunciation. Oxford:
Oxford University Press
Gimson, A.C. and Cruttenden, A. (1994). Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. London:
Arnold.
Lass, R. (1997). Historical Linguistics and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Maritime and Coastguard Agency, 2007. MCA News Podcast: April.
URL: http://www.vnrs.co.uk/mca/RSS001.rml.
Roach, P. (1991). English Phonetics and Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
CV
BA from the Universidad del País Vasco. Research Grant from the Spanish Ministry of
Education. MA from the Universidad de Oviedo. Lecturer in English Language. I have taught
a varied number of subjects, from English Phonetics to various Englishes for Specific
Purposes. Since 1999, most of my lecturing and research duties and interests have been
devoted to Maritime English.