With every
year that passes, TESOL is acquiring a more egalitarian personality and is more
dedicated to the recognition of the various purposes for English teaching, the
broad spectrum of ownerships of the somewhat organically mutating language that
we know as English, the ways in which this language unites many different
collectives around the world. That’s a long sentence; in a way, it tries to
convey the scope of the conference we attended and the direction it took.
Among
some of the teaching concerns being approached along refreshing new lines is
pronunciation. With the acceptance of the nature of English as a
multi-communicative connector, the influence of pronunciation is also shifting
slightly in intent and interpretation. In previous conferences, I have attended
several sessions dedicated to a focus on pronunciation as having a form of
purifying influence on the production of English, creating exercises and games
to attend to the oral exactness of the “th”, the shaping of vowel sounds, the
oddly difficult combination of “orld” in “world”, etc. Attention to
pronunciation more recently is not related to what, in the past, were common
references like “standard American English”, “standard collegiate English”,
etc. After all, what is “standard” in South Carolina is not necessarily
standard in Oregon or Nevada, and the “college” in question might be in Sidney,
Glasgow, London, New york, or somewhere in South Africa or India.
Twenty speakers
in different locations around the world might give surprisingly different
renditions of the following sentence: “I hurt myself working on the hood of the
car in the late half of the day.” What is definitely a priority concern is the
intelligibility of the message, the immediacy of its power to communicate; this
concept broadens the scope of how to regard pronunciation and its effective
connection – for better or for worse – to the result of an attempt at
general communication.
One of the sessions I attended took me momentarily back
to a bus tour that I took some years ago in Scotland. I was sitting right
behind the bus driver and happy to be receiver of many side comments he made
during the trip; one of these remarks was offered to describe what a large
number of laborers were doing on the road at almost dusk…the driver said they
were walking/working on the road, and in my interpretation of the driver’s
tone, neither activity was appropriate for that time of day. The problem was
one involving accent; I couldn’t for the life of me determine (even upon
further inquiry) whether those people were “walking” or “working”, because of
the pronunciation of the vowel in the main verb….and no amount of repetition on
the driver’s part shed any definitive light on the subject. I finally decided
that those men just shouldn’t be on the road doing anything and would be
better off at some nearby pub. End of subject.
Fortunately, the subject of
pronunciation has not ended, and this conference was an example of the variety
of views that are developing with regard to the influence of pronunciation on
communication and to how general is the acceptance that the “native English
speaker” is not “the” norm, but - instead – just one of them.
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| Katy Cox |
