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Pron-SIG Index Page

N-1 March, 2002

Content:

I. A message from the co-ordinator

II. The list of PRONSIG officers elected for the year 2002.

III. Call for membership

IV. Call for ideas

V. Problems with pronunciation teaching in Japan and ways of solving them.

There are some problems in this newlsetter with special fonts appearing as mojibake. I apologize for this problem. Elin

I. A MESSAGE FROM THE CO-ORDINATOR

Dear members of JALT PRONSIG interest group,

It is my pleasure to announce that Pronsig came into being as a Forming Special Interest Group of The Japan Association for Language Teaching during the PAC3 at JALT2001 on November 25, 2001. This conference will remain a very memorable event also because of the Pronunciation Colloquium organized by the SIG. The Colloquium with the participation of world-leading pronunciation teaching experts Barbara Bradford and Adrian Underhill was attended by about 40 people, and received very positive feedback.

I would like to thank both the presenters for their wonderful performance and the attendants who contributed to the exchange of ideas during the discussion session and also patiently and co-operatively sat through the inaugurational meeting of the SIG. During the meeting which has beaten the World Record for the shortest duration (it lasted about 10 minutes!) the formation of SIG was proclaimed and the SIG officials were elected for the year 2002. For anyone interested in the elections procedure, I explain that anyone considering himself/herself a member of Pronsig could take part in the elections, and that the candidates were people who (very kindly!!!) volunteered to hold the officials posts (for the names and contact details of officers, please, refer to the next section of the newsletter).

In this way, we have made the first step. Let us no consider what we have and what we yet have not.

Optimistic side

1. We have started a Forming SIG which would hopefully contribute to the awareness of the issues in pronunciation training by both teachers and learners of English as a foreign language. At last, we have the SIG!

2. We have functioning officers.

3. We have 35 members on the e-mail interest list both in Japan and abroad.

4. We have an e-mail newsletter.

Still optimistic but problematic side

1. We are only a FORMING SIG, which means that we have no money at all because according to current JALT regulations, only a FULL SIG (i.e. having 50 registered members who have paid registration and SIG membership fees) can open an account and have access to its own membership fees and general JALT resources.

2. We are not sure who is and who is not a JALT and PRONSIG member (from the people on the Pronsig interest list). We need your co-operation in clarifying this (refer to call for members).

3. We need to get 50 people who are JALT members to get the status of 'FULL' Sig.

4. Since we have virtually ZERO budget, we cannot PRINT the newsletter, and I am therefore sending it by e-mail. Of course, if you may go off e-mail, or if you know someone who is interested in the activities of the PRONSIG, but is off e-mail, please, send the name and address to either the co-ordinator or the membership director, and I shall print out and send the newsletter as an exception (using my own research expenses).

5. We do not yet have a webpage. It appears its creation is one of the tasks of primary importance and urgency.

Can anyone volunteer to create a webpage for the SIG?

Finally, and most optimistically, we are just starting, so any ideas regarding the SIG functioning, events, newsletter content, etc, etc. would be most welcome (refer to the Call for ideas). Please, consider what you need the SIG to do for you and what you could do for the SIG.

Let us make our SIG together!

With best wishes,
Veronika Makarova,
SIG co-ordinator

II. The list of PRONSIG OFFICERS elected for the year 2002.

1. Co-ordinator :
Name: Veronika Makarova
Affiliation: Meikai University, AIST.
Address: Namiki 3-663, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0040, Japan
Tel: 0298-567862
office fax (does not function on university vacations and holidays): 047-350-5504
e-mail: makarova.veronika@aist.go.jp

2. Newsletter editor:
Name: Stephen Lambacher,
Affiliation: University of Aizu
Address: Center for Language Research Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima-ken Japan 965-8580
email: lambach@u-aizu.ac.jp
http://www.u-aizu.ac.jp/~steeve

3. Director of Membership
Name: Elin Melchior
Affiliation: Komaki English Teaching Center
Address: Komaki English Teaching Center, 2-107 Komaki, Komaki 485-0041, Japan.
tel. 568 76 0905; fax: 568 71 8396;
e-mail: elin@gol.com

4. Director of Programmes
Name: Denise Boyd,
Affiliation: Sumitomo Metals,
Address: c/o Sumitomo Metals, Sitix Division, 2201 Kamioda, Ohaza, Kouhoku-cho, Kishima-gun, Saga 849-0506, Japan
tel. 0952-71-6555 (Ext. 220);
e-mail: dboyd@sitix.co.jp

5. Treasurer
Name: Takeshi Kikuchi
Affiliation: Hitachi Second Senior High School
Address: Hitachi Second Senior High School, 3-2-1 Kashima-cho, Hitachi-shi, Ibaraki-ken, 317-0071, Japan.
tel. 0294-22-3254;
e-mail: tkikuchi@ingjapan.ne.jp

III. Call for membership
As was outlined in the co-ordinator's letter, we could progress much faster and have access to funding after we have got the status of a full SIG. To do so, we need to get 50 (FIFTY) PRONSIG members who would also be JALT members. This does not in the least diminish the value and possible contribution of our dear Associate members (i.e. people who are simply interested in getting information about the SIG activities but may not wish to join either the SIG or JALT. We highly welcome anyone interested in pronunciation teaching in Japan to be with us and share ideas. However, JALT regulations (which may not be ideal according to my personal opinion) require us to think about the possibility of getting more members. In this sense, it appears at least two measures are necessary.

Firstly, besides the above listed 5 SIG officers, only the following (out of 35) interest group members reported their belonging to both PRONSIG and JALT: Hitoshi Fukuda, Courtney De Rouen, Martin Pauly, John Dykes and (maybe?) Kazuhiko Nanda . If you are not listed among these names, but you ARE a JALT member and you WANT to be a member of PRONSIG, please, kindly contact the Membership director (see contact details above) or (alternatively) the co-ordinator.

Secondly, I would like to encourage every member to be brave and take the initiative in finding ways of attracting new members. Do you know someone interested in pronunciation teaching? Please, point out to this person the existence of PRONSIG and the contact details. Can you think of any event which we could organize (for free!!!) or we could take part in, and that could attract new members? Please, share!

IV. Call for ideas
Let us consider together what could be done along the following two directions

IV. 1. SIG events
Firstly, and URGENTLY I would like to encourage some representatives of PRONSIG to take part in the PAN-SIG Consortium "Practical and theoretical aspects of bilingual development & education" to be held in Kyoto Inst. Technology, May 11-12, 2002 (for detailed info, please, refer to the Language Teacher, Vol 26 N 2).

If there is anything you could present related to Pron. Teaching, PLEASE, contact the conference organizers and the PRONSIG co-ordinator. We need you to represent the PRONSIG at the conference!

Secondly, please share any ideas regarding events PRONSIG could organize or take part in organization. It does not necessarily have to be something grand. If, for example, you

think your university would be interested in a seminar/lecture on pronunciation teaching and you can (probably together with a colleague or two) organize a lecture/seminar on pronunciation teaching, please, contact the PRONSIG co-ordinator and/or Director of Programmes.

IV.2. Newsletter content

Please, help to design a newsletter which would be best suited to your needs. If there is any book you wish to review or have reviewed, if there is any section which you would like to permanently appear on the newsletter, if you wish to advertise some pronunciation teaching software or have some questions related to some aspect of pronunciation teaching, please forward your suggestions, questions, issues for discussion to the co-ordinator and/or newsletter editor.

V. Problems with pronunciation teaching in Japan

As the first topic for discussion we offer the issue of problems with pronunciation teaching in Japan (and ways of their solving as well).

We start the discussion by giving below a paper on this issue by V. Makarova.

If you have any considerations regarding why pronunciation is so much neglected in Japan, what are the native (Japanese) language-specific and universal problems in pronunciation teaching, what needs to be done in Japan to improve the situation with pronunciation teaching, please, contribute to the discussion either by a paper or by a comment addressed to the co-ordinator or the newspaper editor.

This issue was compiled by the SIG co-ordinator and edited by the SIG Newspaper editor.

ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION TEACHING: JAPAN AND BEYOND
Veronika Makarova

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper considers two kinds of problems of English pronunciation teaching in Japan: the ones which are in common with other parts of the world (methodological and conceptual crisis, lack of ties between speech technologies and pronunciation teaching, disregard of the local situations) and the ones which are caused by the specific local factors (katakana transcription, lack of trained professionals, administrative conservatism, etc.). Some solutions to these problems are offered, in particular, the development of local-based pronunciation teaching methods and the employment of advances of speech technologies for pronunciation training. Further suggestions regarding prioritizing pronunciation teaching and electronic visual feedback are given in the following chapters by Bradford and Lambacher.

English pronunciation of Japanese learners of English is a particularly fascinating topic to pursue since firstly, its obvious problems have become an internationally notorious source of jokes about mispronunciations, and, secondly, because within Japan, it has been causing typhoons of differently charged emotions.

Regarding the anecdotal features of the sounds of Japanese English, it should be first noted that although there is absolutely no evidence that the pronunciation of Japanese learners of English is any worse than pronunciation of other speakers of English as a foreign language, it is also true that Japanese English often sounds incomprehensible enough to lead to serious communication problems as well as embarrassing, difficult or dangerous situations. For example, one Japanese tourist was reported to get to Torquay (a town in southwest England) instead of Turkey because she could not pronounce /3:/ properly, and her destination was therefore misunderstood (The Japan Times, 21 June, 1997). A never-ending supply of anecdotes is provided by the Japanese habit of replacing /l/s by /r/s in very 'inappropriate places', like 'presidential elections' or 'this is a long queue'. On Japanese TV we often see programmes which ridicule English mistakes in general, and pronunciation errors in particular. Although based on real mispronunciation evidence, all this fun poked in the face of Japanese learners contributes to their 'English inferiority' complex and makes them believe that English pronunciation is too difficult, and its acquisition &endash; impossible for them (an assertion I often hear from my students and have to fight against).

Within Japan, on the one hand, English pronunciation training is in demand. According to a survey of the attitudes of Japanese university students, they prefer teachers with good pronunciation, and are more interested in pronunciation training than in learning foreign culture or foreign literature (Makarova & Ryan, 2000). In a small questionnaire I distributed this year to 120 Japanese university students, all of them, with one exception, expressed a concern for their pronunciation and a desire to have it improved. It should be noted that female students rank the importance of the pronunciation aspect higher than male students (Makarova & Ryan, 1998). Since females are generally known to be more sensitive to the social prestige of pronunciation standards (Sunderland, 1994), this fact is another indirect proof of the value of good English pronunciation in the Japanese society.

On the other hand, there is some contradictory evidence that too native-like pronunciation can be undesirable, as it is perceived as a threat to the national or group identity. For example, it has been reported that Japanese returnee students often deliberately speak with an exaggerated Japanese accent to prevent bullying for sounding like a foreigner (Tobin, 1995).

As far as researchers are concerned, they also tend to succumb to emotions describing pronunciation of Japanese EFL learners as "in the best scenario placing unnecessary strain on the listeners and in the worst critically impeding communication" (Futatsuya & Chick, 1996:15)

Despite the existence of a market for pronunciation training (reflected in public attention to pronunciation issues and in the desire for higher pronunciation standards expressed in surveys of students' opinions), there is hardly anything to fill it in. English pronunciation teaching in Japan "remains something of an embarrassment, is often just ignored or, at best, included only superficially" (Acton, 1997: 21), or, talking practically, it is not normally a part of either high school or university curricula. While it is obvious that 'nothing comes out of nothing' and good pronunciation cannot be expected from students who have never been trained to produce it, the blame for pronunciation errors of Japanese learners of English is often put on the limitations of the sound system of Japanese which has 5 vowels, very few consonants and only open syllables Japanese (Wells, 2000). Yet, for speakers of many other languages the acquisition of English pronunciation is hard as well (Kenworthy, 1987, Pennington, 1996). As this chapter strives to show, the problems with English pronunciation in Japan lie not so much in the Japanese/English language interference per se, but in inadequacies of pronunciation teaching. Some of these inadequacies Japan shares with the rest of the world, whereas others are uniquely Japanese, as will be shown in the next sections.

2. THE 'GLOBAL' PROBLEMS

2.1. Methodological restraints

Until very recently pronunciation teaching in general has been suffering relative neglect in ELT which, besides some social factors (ref. Makarova, 2000b), I explain by the effect of the communicative method. Communicative method in its origins was aimed to 'kill the drill'. Since traditional pronunciation teaching had a connection with drills, it was almost done away with. To the best of my knowledge, the word 'pronunciation' itself does not appear at all in any of Krashen's (the central theoretician of the communicative approach) writings. Students were required to communicate, and any attention to the superficial niceties of form was seen as extravagant. Typical "communicative" approach is paradoxically represented even in writings of some leading proponents of pronunciation teaching, like Adam Brown, who wrote: "My point is not so much do discuss whether pronunciation ought to be a part of each lesson plan as to point out that pronunciation necessarily does appear in each lesson. ...As soon as the teacher starts the lesson by saying 'Good morning', the students are exposed to utterances of English, which they will take as exemplars of good pronunciation, correct grammar and appropriate vocabulary choice.

However, it is not necessary that explicit pronunciation teaching should appear in every ELT lesson. Often any attention to pronunciation takes the form of remedial action as and when it is required. What is more important is that when pronunciation teaching does appear, it is integrated into the language as a whole and not studied as a phenomenon divorced from the process of communication.

There is a saying in ELT circles: 'a drill is a device for boring'. It is unfortunate that many attempts by teachers at pronunciation teaching take the form of drilling, and therefore lack interest. One of the major movements within ELT in the 1980s was away from teaching language as a formal system towards using language as a means of communicating in realistic tasks. Some writers claim that it is this failure to teach pronunciation communicatively, in meaningful exchange and problem-posing tasks, which accounts for the failure of much pronunciation teaching to date (Brown, 1992, 13-14)".

The 'prohibition' of explicit pronunciation teaching and its status of a 'remedial action' moved pronunciation teaching either completely away from the language learning process or to its distant periphery.

Fortunately, the Communicative Approach Regime has become more tolerant towards pronunciation due to a number of attempts to integrate pronunciation teaching into a communicative lesson plan (Kenworthy, 1992; Celce-Murcia et al.1997; Morley, 1996; Pennington, 1996). A typical 'neo-communicative' 'softened' attitude is represented in the following quote: "Today's speech/pronunciation instruction is not set aside from the mainstream of communicative language learning, namely, from meaning, discourse, context and situation, nor is today's SP/PR instruction drill-based sets of minimal-pairs exercises - a misleading myth, a hold-over perspective, falsely perpetuated by those who are unaware of the fact that we are, today, far beyond the wholesale use of such audiolingual-only techniques.

Traditional pronunciation teaching practices focused primarily - often exclusively - on the competence area that Canale and Swain (1980) define as linguistic competence (here, phonetic-phonological competence). Current SP/PR instructional protocol, on the other hand, is concerned first and foremost with the macrolevel -- with procedures whose goal is discourse competence and those global elements of communicability central to communicative competence, ones that must be integrated with goals of sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence. Within this larger instructional framework, there remains, of course, a continuing focus on the microlevel (i.e. linguistic competence) with attention to the discrete segmental and suprasegmental elements of pronunciation " (Morley, 1996: 140-141).

It appears from this quote that although the "linguistic protocol" allows pronunciation teaching, the latter is yet a relatively unimportant element as compared to the mysterious 'sociolinguistic and strategic competence'. It also looks as if drills still remain forbidden. It is unclear, though, how pronunciation skills can be acquired without drills. Pronunciation training is a complicated procedure requiring a learner to take control of over 200 speech muscles. Any new physical skill requires systematic repetition and drills without which it would not develop. We see that regarding this point neo-communicative approach to pronunciation teaching is close to the audio-lingual and 'classical communicative' belief that pronunciation would just 'come' on its own under language exposure. Unfortunately, this does not often happen with adult learners of a foreign language.

While language teaching and applied linguistic theories were giving pronunciation the cold shoulder a small group of pronunciation teaching enthusiasts tried hard to develop teaching techniques. Devoid of theoretical framework they richly borrowed from drama, music, dance, speech training and even yoga (E.g. Bell, 1997). Not everyone accepted such methods. For example, David Nunan unkindly wrote that 'efforts to teach pronunciation have sometimes resulted in practices which range from the mildly eccentric to the bizarre, including rhythmic chants and dances designed to get learners to integrate their bodily movements and gestures with their attempts at articulating the new language. The popularity of such practices has persisted despite the fact that there is little empirical evidence that they are significantly more effective than more traditional exercises" (Nunan, 1998:100). Although the 'wonder-working' claims in regard of most pronunciation teaching methods do, indeed, often come unsupported by any real experimental evidence, and this cannot but provoke skepticism, it is largely due to such desperate efforts of pronunciation enthusiasts that pronunciation teaching is widely discussed nowadays. The fact that David Nunan started writing about pronunciation teaching in his recent works (e.g., Nunan, 1998) is a landmark on its own since he had never before noticed the existence of this Cinderella of ELT. Certain excesses of pronunciation teachers is a clear indication of the inability of modern applied linguistics and language teaching to account for the needs of pronunciation learning.

In other areas of ELT the Communicative approach is pushed aside by newer methods, like learner-centeredness and learner autonomy, focusing on the language learner's needs (Nunan, 1998). Investigations of language learners' demands have shown that pronunciation is one of the highest-ranking aspects of TEFL in many different countries (Willing, 1988), and that the neglect of pronunciation teaching cannot be justified. This understanding of the learners' 'lawful right for pronunciation training' gave a rise to a recent wave of new teaching materials and books on pronunciation teaching (e.g., to mention only a few, Dalton & Seidlhoffer, 1994; Laroy, 1995; Pennington, 1996; Kelly, 2000; Jenkins, 2000). Yet there is no sound framework allowing theoretical backup of pronunciation teaching within any of the new general ELT approaches. Unless such attempts to incorporate pronunciation teaching into 'mainstream ELT theory' are exercised to overcome this methodological crisis, pronunciation teaching is doomed to remain a 'marginal ELT art'.

In order to improve the situation, it appears that local pronunciation teachers and researchers could work along the following three directions:

1. to develop the empirical research allowing to evaluate and compare the efficiency of different pronunciation teaching tasks, activities and methods

2. to investigate the effect of pronunciation training on other language skills (For an interesting suggestion of ties between pronunciation and other EFL skills, refer to Hirai, this volume.)

3. to put forward locally suitable methodologies 'bottom up' rather than to keep waiting for their descent 'top down'.

As far as Japan is concerned, the Japanese Ministry of Education is still promoting Communicative method (Smith, this volume) and with it emanate communicative 'semi-taboo' attitudes to pronunciation teaching. To make things worse, the Japanese educational tradition gives by far more attention to written language than to spoken language (ref. Hirai; Smith; Ryan & Makarova, this volume). Both 'tradition' and the imposed from above 'reform' in Japanese ELT are therefore unfavorable for pronunciation teaching. In the English language curriculum revision undertaken by my university in order to make teaching more communicative and profession-oriented, the first thing to go was ...pronunciation classes, an quite a considerable amount of effort is still being invested to have them back. The administrative attitudes to pronunciation teaching in Japanese ELT therefore can be best described as discriminatory: it is simply neglected in favour of other English language skills.

2.2. Conceptual quicksands: shifting standards.

Recognition of the new emerging status of English as a language for International Communication has lead to a re-consideration of the issues of language standards in general and of the model for pronunciation teaching in particular. The traditional 'General American' or 'RP' choice has first been widened to include other 'native Englishes', like Estuary English, Australian, etc. Some recent pronunciation courses include the 'second language' English by speakers from Africa or India (e.g. Kenworthy, 2000). It was suggested that a foreign language learners could 'clone' his/her pronunciation after a certain speaker of English (Jenkins, 2000). Finally, the validity of 'native or (at the worst) near-native English' as a model has been questioned and it was proposed that successful L2 learners also present an adequate model for pronunciation learning (Keys, 2000) and that the learners may be allowed to maintain the elements of their L1 sound system in English as long as it does not impede communication (Jenkins, 2000). Since many a debate has been held over this issue, it is impossible to give it a full credit within the limits of a small chapter. However, just to provide a few brief comments of the issue, I would like to mention that on the one hand, Jenkins's position is psychologically encouraging and gratifying both to a foreign learner and a pronunciation teacher since it relieves them of the Utopian goal of making every foreign student of English sound 'native'. On the other hand, Jenkins's position is not free of controversy.

Firstly, it is not clear how to define 'intelligibility' limits. According to Jenkins (2000), such 'trifles' as a replacement of /th/ by /t/ or /s/ should not cause communicative problems, whereas in reality it does. My Japanese students did not understand the meaning of a whole passage from the speech of an Indian student because he said 'tick' instead of 'thick', and they could not figure out how to make a soup 'tick'.

Secondly, the factor of social prestige of a model accent appears to be missing in Jenkins's (2000) concept. Even in 'native English' countries some accents can be perceived more favourably than others (in a recent survey American accent ranked the highest as compared to others (Bayard et al, 2001). Unless personally interested in another variety of English, foreign learners are more likely to go for a socially 'prestigious' model.

Thirdly, I find it hard to imagine anyone taking as a model a bunch of a few non-distinctive phonological features: if Japanese substitute /th/ in 'thick' for /su/, Russians for /s'/, and Indians for /t/, what is the model SOUND of International /th/?

The important practical application of these debates about the acceptable standards, it appears, is the ability to customize pronunciation training to the needs of learners. Some learners still opt for the unpopular with linguistics RP, some of them prefer to have a go at American, Australian, African, Sri Lankan or any other English which may be of use or interest. Yet some others may be perfectly happy with their Japanese (or any other foreign) accent, and be able to say without any inferiority complex that 'I am a speaker of Japanese (or whatever other) English!' The role of the teacher is then not so much in hammering one particular variety of English into students' heads, but in pointing out to them the kaleidoscope of possible choices and equipping them with the 'know-how' of individual pronunciation self-training once the choice was made.

2.3. Lack of ties between speech technologies and pronunciation training

In many countries the advances of speech technology push forward the implementation of its latest achievements in education. The process, however, goes much slower than one would expect, and applications of speech technology in language teaching are lagging far behind the developments in speech synthesis and recognition, man-machine dialogue system, visual and hearing aids, etc.

Originally spoken language technologies were geared towards helping people with speech, language, visual, and hearing problems rather than towards foreign language learning. Although the first attempts to apply electronic visual feedback for the needs of pronunciation teaching go way back into the 60-s--70-s (Vardanian, 1964; de Bot, 1983), only very recently educational applications of speech processing are becoming a noticeable part of contributions at conferences on speech technologies. Yet, these results do not seem to get well transmitted from the laboratories and research groups to education, and language teachers frequently remain unaware of the speech technologies developments or their possible applications.

In many countries we find a recent trend towards integration of speech sciences, linguistics and education whereby multi- and interdisciplinary structures are formed investigating linguistic, engineering, neuroscientific, cognitive and other aspects of speech (e.g. Center for Speech Technology Research of Edinburgh university, Center for Spoken Language Understanding at Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, and many others). In Japan, however, a strong traditional segregation of speech technology and teaching continues. Speech synthesis and recognition are done mostly in research institutes and laboratories and in computer departments of a few elite universities. They hardly ever have any contacts with language departments of universities where language teaching is done. As will be shown below, language teachers in Japan generally do not specialize in pronunciation teaching, and also very rarely they have qualifications in speech analysis required for teaching pronunciation with electronic visual feedback.

The solutions can be seen in

1. implementing easy-to-use and low cost systems of electronic visual feedback (Ref. examples below)

2. employing openly available on the web computer corpora, dictionaries with sound files and other computer aids in pronunciation teaching (ref. examples below).

3. popularizing CALL tools for pronunciation teaching via teachers' organizations (like IATEFL, JALT and their pronunciation special interest groups).

While issues related to pronunciation training with electronic visual feedback are covered in full detail in Lambacher (this volume), it should be also mentioned that firstly, recent electronic visual feedback systems start going beyond the practice of non-native stimulus assessment by comparing its acoustic features with the model ones 'by eye'. Some systems have been trained for automatic assessment of pronunciation quality (Franco & Neumeyer, 1998). Speech technologies provide possibilities of automatic assessment of such a seemingly subjective feature as 'language fluency' by taking account of objective criteria which include rate of speech, phonation/time ratio, average length of pause, filled pauses, etc. (Cucchiarini, Strik & Boves, 1998). Systems automatically detecting pronunciation errors have also been developed (Jo et al. 1998).

A few examples of free downloadable speech processing software that can be adapted for pronunciation teaching include

Wavesurfer: http://www.speech.kth.se/wavesurfer

CSLU Speech Toolkit: http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/tools.htm

Praat: http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat

Secondly, besides electronic visual feedback, modern speech technologies offer completely new resources for pronunciation teaching, like computer corpora, dictionaries with sound files and online pronunciation courses (Donahue, 1999; MakarovaÅC2001b,c). Computer corpora are already widely used for studying grammar, vocabulary and writing (Leech, 2000; Iwasaki, this volume; Nozawa, this volume). However, they have not been so far used for the needs of pronunciation teaching because until recently computer corpora dealt mostly with written rather than spoken texts. The situation is rapidly changing, and sound corpora are becoming more widely available and accessible either on CDs or directly on the web (e.g. International Variation in English (IViE) corpus developed at Dpt. Linguistics, Cambridge University) or the International Corpus of English (ICE) developed internationally and available from UCL). The latter is particularly relevant in the light of the 'widened English models' discussed above since it includes samples from Australia, Canada, East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania), Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, UK, and the United States. As P. Roach puts it, it is necessary to provide "much wider access to corpora of authentic material and let learners really get in among genuine data" (Vaughan-Rees, 2000).

2. 4. Disregard of the local situation

The directions of possible clashes between the 'global' and 'local' in pronunciation teaching have been reported in detail in Makarova, 2001a. A very brief summary of the most important points follows.

When applying a centrally developed pronunciation teaching technique, teachers have to consider if it is suitable to the local situation (the latter implies not only the national culture, but age group, educational settings, etc). While cultural compatibility is generally an important factor in choosing an ELT method, technique or procedure (ref. Ryan & Makarova, present volume), it is particularly vital for pronunciation training which deals with the physical aspect of moving articulators. Performing breathing exercises or asking students to jump up to illustrate accented syllables may be culturally inappropriate with a group of Japanese university students (constrained by shyness) or with their Russian peers (constrained by the formal atmosphere of tuition), but may work fine with groups of the same nationals of pre-school age (Makarova, 2001a). Knowledge of the factors of local educational culture can also help teachers to predict a method better suited to learners' culturally formed expectations and learning strategies, e.g. generally written-text dependent Japanese learners (ref. Hirai, this volume) react very well to phonics elements in pronunciation training, which allow them to tie a written sign with a sound. Lastly, the knowledge of the native language of the learners allows the teachers to turn L1 resources to the help of English pronunciation teaching. To give only one illustration of this, I shall refer to the example of the difficulties Japanese students are expected to have with English consonant clusters because none are found in Japanese (Kelly, 2000). However, phonetic consonant clusters do exist in conversational Japanese (kiritsu> k'rits (sit down)), and can help Japanese learners to deal with the English clusters as well. (Refer for further examples to Makarova, 2001a; Walker, 2001).

3. Local problems with pronunciation teaching in Japan

3.1. Lack of trained professionals

Insufficient attention is given to pronunciation teaching in teacher training programs not only in Japan, but world-wide (Ross, 1992). Due to the prevalence of communicative methodologies and the 'grammar-vocabulary tilt' in Japanese ELT, no institutions in Japan offer even a Master's degree in pronunciation teaching. As has been mentioned above, very few universities include pronunciation teaching into either undergraduate or postgraduate courses.

What follows is a vicious circle: pronunciation is not taught because there are no trained professionals to teach it, and no trained professionals can emerge because pronunciation is not taught. Another vicious circle: even though a trained professional may be available (e.g. by means of getting a relevant degree in a university abroad), he or she would not be able to get a job for the lack of demand in specialists in this generally unpopular field. Since a specialist in pronunciation teaching in Japan is very likely to be unemployed, hardly anyone is willing to specialize in this 'dead end' sphere. A look at ELT job advertisements in Japan would confirm that not a SINGLE opening over the last few years required expertise in pronunciation teaching or phonetics.

The victims of these vicious circles of the administrative conservatism which fosters tilted language and employment policies are Japanese students who cannot get qualified 'treatment' of their English language pronunciation 'maladies'. The only solution seen is in attempts to popularize pronunciation issues via teachers' organizations, such as IATEFL or JALT.

3.2. Unfavourable settings: Large groups

Pronunciation training requires intensive interaction between the teacher and the learner whereby the teacher supplies information, gives models, offers cues, suggestions and constructive feedback about performance, sets high standards, provides a wide variety of practice opportunities and supports and encourages the learner (Morley, 1991).

Such interaction is impossible in case of a typical Japanese class where students' numbers can vary between 30 and 130. This lack of opportunity for direct teacher - individual student contact is harmful for pronunciation training, but can be partly compensated for by CALL tools decribed above and effective class management (e.g. via games described below)

3.3. Unfavourable educational and social environment: 'Examination hell', TOEFL-mania and flaws in curricular designs

English is normally included in Japan into subjects for university entrance examinations. "Examinations are considered hell because of the extensive preparations that students go through in order to get ready for them" (Brown, 1995:21). English taught both in high schools and in cram schools is therefore mostly geared towards training students to perform a limited number of written tasks related to text comprehension, grammar, lexis and idioms as well as listening comprehension. No elements of active language production are tested. Generally, high school and cram school teachers do not have enough energy, time or motivation to deal with 'unnecessary' (i.e. unreclaimed at university entrance exams) language production skills, pronunciation in particular.

The same limitation of putting an emphasis on passive rather than active, and written rather than oral language skills is true of English proficiency exams, which constitute another major demand/offer shaping force in the English teaching market in Japan. Taking TOEFL or TOEIC tests is a widely spread practice in Japan (Stupak, 1995). A high test score is often necessary for taking part in exchange or study abroad programs, as well as for enrolment or promotion in many Japanese companies. Pronunciation along with other active language production skills is disregarded in preparations for these tests.

In universities, English conversation, writing, reading and listening are routinely included into curricular for English majors, but a course in pronunciation is a great rarity. Theoretically speaking, elements of pronunciation may be included into a conversation course, but practically speaking, since very few teachers have qualifications or interest in pronunciation, it ends up not being taught even as a 'remedial action'.

3.4. Written dependency and katakana transcription

It has been already mentioned that due to both L1 and L2 educational traditions Japanese students develop a general written text dependence which is a hindrance to speaking (Ref. Kobayashi; Hirai this volume). Other authors in the volume also comment on the inadequacies of general speaking skills of Japanese learners due to a variety of reasons, such as shyness, lack of vocabulary, lack of speaking experience in written exam-oriented education, etc. (Iwasaki; Ryan & Makarova, this volume). One specific element of the Japanese writing tradition, which needs to be addressed here because it has a particularly harmful effect on English pronunciation, is katakana transcription of foreign words.

The existence of a system for representing the sounds of borrowed words in the native language serves as a source of additional interference which adds to the interference between the native and L2 language systems (Pennington, 1996). Katakana, a syllabic alphabet including 5 vowel, 17 consonants and 119 syllables is used in Japan for the transcription of both foreign loan words in Japanese and as a form of transcription for words of a studied foreign language. The unsuitability of katakana as a media for the transcription of English words has been frequently commented on (e.g., Higgins, Higgins & Shima, 1995). The effect of katakana transcription of loan words is negatively affects not only for pronunciation but vocabulary and communication in general (Makarova, 2001c).

As far as English pronunciation is concerned, when a loan word is written in katakana it is subjected to an obligatory phonemic restructuring whereby the phonemes of English are substituted by the 'closest match' from the open syllable katakana inventory (Ishiwata, 1986). The original word in most cases changes beyond recognition by native English speakers. For example, 'level' turns into 'reberu,' coffee' into 'kohi'. Frequently the phonemic restructuring is accompanied by a word shortening and/or a semantic change. For example, a 'building' turns into a 'biru,' 'restructuring' turns into a 'risutora' meaning 'staff reduction' or 'sacking'.

Since Japanese learners of English first learn many foreign words in their katakana equivalent, the katakana phonemic pattern is firmly secured in their memory and slows the process of English phonology acquisition on the whole, and of perception and production of many individual words.

I performed a small pilot experiment of the effects of katakana on pronunciation with my students. They were given pictures of different animals the names of which they are likely to have learnt in their native language in katakana transcription. The pictures were labelled with the English names of the animals written in spelling and in IPA transcription. I practiced reading this list with the students whereby they repeated every word after me a few times. After this I asked the students some questions about the animals and verbally corrected their pronunciation of the animal's name if it was wrong. After one week's time interval, I asked my students to reproduce the names of the animals they learnt in the previous class. I list below some mispronunciations which demonstrate that the effect of katakana transcription of the loan words is so strong that it overrides the given pronunciation instruction. The frequency of every pronunciation error in the words produced by 30 students is given in brackets. The list is sorted by the total number of pronunciation errors in each word.

English word Katakana transcription Misconstrued pronunciation pronunciation

Kangaroo �ð�ÞŸ- (kangaruu) kangalu (5), kangolu (1)

Gorilla �Þÿ� (gorira) gorira (2), golila (1), golira (1),

Koala �±� (koara) koara (5)

Armadillo ±ŸœºÞ¤ (arumajiro) arumajiro (3), arumashiro (1)

Rabbit �ÀÞ؃ (rabito) rabitto (3), ravitto (1)

Lion ׾µð (raion) raion (3)

Beaver ÀÞ� Þ (beeba) beba (3)

Bambi  ÞðÀÞ (banbi) banbi (3)

Zebra æÞÃÞ� (zebura) zibura (1), zebla (1)

Mouse œ�� (mausu) mauth (1)

Buffalo  ÞØÃߤ�(baffaro) buffarou (1)

Chimpanzee ¡ð þðºÞ� (chinpanjii) chimpanji (1)

Orangutan µ�ð��¿ð(oranuutan) olanutan (1)

Hamster  &emdash;�¿ (hamusuta) hamusta (1)

Elephant ¥�Ãßðƒ (erefanto) elefanto (1)

While it is generally agreed that katakana is as harmful to English learning as a Colorado beetle to crops, it is not clear what to do about it. It has been argued that since Japanese learners are accustomed to transcribing foreign words in katakana, nothing can be done about it except reforming katakana transcription so that it would better suit the original English pronunciation of words (Shimaoka, 2000). Revised katakana transcription (or KIPA, Katakana International Phonetic Alphabet, as its author calls it) suggests, for example, that the word 'stretch' traditionally 'katakanized' as �¬�¡ (sutsurechi) should be written as �¡�¥¡ (suchuechi), and the �Þ�ðƒÞƒÞ�¿ (gurandodo-ta) transcription of 'granddaughter' should be re-considered as �Þ±ð¿Þ¿± (gueandataa) (Shimaoka, 2000).

It should be noted that there is no evidence that the revisions of katakana actually do work, since no experiments have so far been conducted which would compare the results of instruction based on the traditional and revised katakana notation. But even supposing the revised katakana does work better than the traditional one, one cannot help feeling ambivalent about employing KIPA in pronunciation teaching.

On the one hand, Japanese students (especially at low levels) keep transcribing new English words in katakana in their personal notes even though a teacher may demand an IPA transcription in the assignments to be handed in. Therefore, since the evil cannot be completely exorcised, it may be good if its effect is somewhat diminished by the notation revision. It is inevitable that low level students transcribe foreign language words with their native spelling system. It happens not only in Japan, but in other countries as well. Native spelling-based transcriptions are commonly used in foreign language conversation books for beginners world-wide. It is a manifestation of the initial process of phonetic restructuring of L2 according to the L1 system. As J. C. Wells puts it "When we encounter a foreign language, our natural tendency is to hear it in terms of the sounds of our own language. We actually perceive it rather differently from the way native speakers do. Equally, when we speak a foreign language we tend to attempt to do so using the familiar sounds and sound patterns of our mother tongue. We make it sound, objectively, rather differently from how it sounds when spoken by native speakers. This is the well-documented phenomenon of phonological interference" (2000).

On the other hand, native-language writing systems are typically used by learners only at the very first initial stage, and are discarded at higher levels of L2 acquisition. The specific strong limitations of katakana (it includes only open syllables, 5 vowels and about 17 consonants) make it fundamentally unsuitable as a tool for a transcription of any other language with a wider phonemic and syllabic inventory than Japanese. In fact, it is hardly possible to find another language which would 'fit' into the limited resources offered by katakana.

I would suggest that the ways of handling the 'katakana' problem should depend on the learners' level and the purpose of learning. At very low levels and when the purpose of language acquisition is connected with the written rather than spoken language, katakana transcription can be tolerated. However, at higher levels involving the development of spoken language skills, and in particular, for students majoring in English, katakana notation should be replaced by IPA.

Very importantly, foreign teachers of English should be well aware of the katakana-based errors, and systematically work on their correction. One of the ways to fight the effects of katakana transcription is via language learning games (see section 4), and electronic visual feedback (see section 3 and Lambacher, this volume).

4. SOME FURTHER LOCAL SOLUTIONS: PRONUNCIATION TEACHING GAMES
In this section I talk about pronunciation teaching games which I found to be a valuable tool for student motivation, large class management and fighting pronunciation errors in Japanese university environment.

Pronunciation teaching games have been developed in a number of recent works (Kenworthy,1987; Hewings, 1993; Dalton & Seidlhofer,1994; Laroy, 1995; Hancock,1995). I have elsewhere described a number of pronunciation teaching games which work well with Japanese learners of English and discussed the advantages of using pronunciation teaching games (Makarova, 1996, 1998a,b, 1999, 2000a). I shall therefore only refer in this section to two activities which help to fight the specific obstacle of English pronunciation acquisition in Japan &endash; katakana pronunciation.

The offered activities help to deal with such cases when the katakana transcription of a loan word and its English source differ by the number of syllables.

A 'bike' race.

The purpose of the activity is to demonstrate and emphasize the difference between the prosodic structure of loan words in Japanese and their English sources.

An explanation of the difference in the syllabic structure of English and Japanese is given. Students are then requested to find as many 'minimal pairs' (words differing by the number of syllables) between an English loan word in Japanese and its English source as possible within a limited time. Students are advised to use pronunciation dictionaries. The activity is performed as a contest between groups.

The students come up with lists of words from about 5 to 15 including such pairs as

bike -  Þ��

hike -  ��

rabbit - �ÀÞ؃

cat - �؃

Rhythmical 'boom game'

The purpose of this game is to reinforce the knowledge of the differences in the prosodic structure of words in English and Japanese and to establish automatic production of the correct native English prosodic pattern.

The activity is based on rhythmical clapping. A list of English words (obtained in the previous activity or another one provided by the teacher) is written on the blackboard. Students practice saying these words with rhythmical clapping. Each clap corresponds to one syllable. A student claps his/her knees, then the knees of the neighbor on the right, then the neighbor on the left, then his own ones again, saying one word from the list. The game can be played as a contest between groups. The winning team is the one which keeps the correct rhythm for the longest time.

CONCLUSION
The methodological and conceptual crisis in modern English pronunciation teaching outlined in this chapter can be gradually resolved by developing new approaches based on careful observation and experimental study of the specific demands, abilities, and learning styles of EFL students in different parts of the world. It is important to notice that the L2 pronunciation is affected not only by L1 sound system, but by a variety of other factors as well, such as cultural and educational traditions, social attitudes to English, native language orthographic and writing system, etc. An example of an empirically developed practice locally tailored for Japanese students is offered: pronunciation teaching games helping to fight the specific effects of the L1 orthography. It is suggested that the development of CALL tools for pronunciation training (EVF, corpora, electronic dictionaries) and bringing together speech technologies and education can greatly contribute to customizing and upgrading pronunciation training. Finally, improvement in an EFL learner's pronunciation will have a positive effect on other language teaching skills as well, since there is some evidence that fluent pronunciation stimulates speech production and perception in a foreign language (Cook, 1996; Hirai, this volume).

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