Listening Cherry 10 – Reserved pronunciation
 | Listening Cherries is a blog where I talk about listening issues - from classroom activities to academic research. Listening Cherry no. 10 argues that 'pronunciation' should be reserved. |
Image from here.
It is common to use the word ‘pronunciation(s)’ to refer to the versions of words that present themselves to the listeners ears: Swan (2012) writes of ‘receptive pronunciation’ (see Listening Cherry 09) when writing about listening, and Hancock and McDonald (2014 see Listening Cherry 07 ) have nine chapters with the title ‘Pronunciation for listeners’.
However, I believe it is important to reserve the term ‘pronunciation’ for discussions of the productive skill. So in what I write, I try not to use the term ‘pronunciation’ when talking of listening, in order to prevent discussions of the model of speech we need for listening being clouded by the connotations and associations of the word ‘pronunciation’.
These connotations and associations include those of correctness, precision, and clarity. Questions which learners ask about pronunciation are, typically, of the form:
- What is the correct pronunciation of x?
- How do I pronounce it?
To these questions there are relatively fixed answers which come from the Careful Speech Model (cf. Cauldwell, 2013: 18). With ‘pronunciation’ thus being so strongly associated with notions of correctness and tidiness, I prefer, following Cauldwell, (2013) to use the term ‘sound shapes’ to refer to the variety of ways in which words occur in the stream of speech.
Thus equivalent questions for listening would be:
- What sound shapes am I likely to encounter?
- How should I prepare myself to handle them?
The short answer to question 1 is ‘many more than your pronunciation work prepares you for’. And the short answer to question 2 is ‘vocal gymnastics’ – about which, more soon.
