Phonetics

Phonetics Applied to the Learning of Foreign Languages. —The following is a brief account of the method of using phonetics in learning a foreign language with the aid of a teacher. The task of the teacher is to make his pupil pronounce the foreign language correctly. Consequently his first aim must be to teach him to make the sounds of that language. This is done by imitation coupled with phonetic theory. Thus if the sound to be taught is the French sound of u in lune, and, as is usually the case, the English pupil is unable to make it correctly by imitation, the teacher tells the pupil to perform the following exercise, which is based on the theory of tongue and lip positions: Purse up the lips as for the English oo-sound, and while holding them in that position, try to pronounce the English ee-sound. With a very little practice the French sound of it will result. Again, if the pupil is to learn to make the sound I (Zulu hl, Welsh ll) , the teacher, knowing that the sound is a "voiceless 1," tells him to keep his tongue as if he were going to say an ordinary 1 and then simply blow a strong stream of air through his mouth; this will give a good approximation to the sound, and it can be perfected by a knowledge of the details of the formation of 1-sounds. If the pupil is to learn to make the German sound of ch in recht, the teacher, knowing that its tongue-position is almost identical with that of the English ee-sound, tells .him to keep his tongue as if he were going to say the English ee-sound and then merely to blow out a stream of air. If he is to learn to make the Polish sound of e or Pekingese sound written hs, the teacher tells him to try to make this German sound and s simultaneously, knowing that the attempt to do this will give the right tongue-position. The methods used in the above cases are very simple; in more difficult cases it is often necessary to try several methods before one is found which will enable the pupil to produce the correct sound.

Ear-training.

One of the most important parts of any course of instruction in phonetics consists of "ear-training" or more accurately "cultivation of the auditory memory." The pupil must learn (I) to discriminate between one foreign sound and another which on a first hearing may seem to resemble it ; (2) to discriminate between foreign sounds and sounds of the mother tongue which resemble them; (3) to remember the acoustic qualities of foreign sounds; (4) to recognize foreign sounds with ease and certainty. There is only one method of training the auditory memory, namely "nonsense dictation." The teacher dictates meaningless words made up of sounds of the language to be learnt. The pupil writes what he thinks he hears by means of a phonetic system ; then the teacher can see from the transcript whether the pupil has recognized the foreign sounds correctly. When the pupil makes a mistake, the teacher repeats the mean ingless word firstly as he originally said it and then in the way written by the pupil; he repeats the two pronunciations a num ber of times so that the pupil may hear clearly the nature of his mistake. The pupil's course of study should include a large

amount of this type of exercise carefully graduated. Thus if the pupil is learning the pronunciation of French, the earlier ear training exercises would contain easy words such as the following: petoze, vDfenut, fakOna, The exercises become progressively more difficult until words are given such as: pfestriD3nwebm, uidznezmcerla, baDzvalalafkee. (The sys tem of transcription used here and elsewhere in this article is that of the International Phonetic Association.) Later on, the exercises are made still more difficult by the introduction of sounds of the pupil's mother tongue.

Phonetic Transcription.

Besides being able to hear the foreign sounds correctly and to make them correctly the pupil must know which are the appropriate sounds to use in words and sentences. This information is best conveyed to him by means of a phonetic notation, i.e., by spelling the words and sentences with an alphabet which provides one letter for each phoneme (see p. 774) of the language. (In certain cases, in order to avoid introducing additional symbols, it is convenient to represent a sound by means of a digraph, i.e., a sequence of two letters; thus the sounds of German z and English ch are commonly transcribed ts, tf .) The pupil's course of study should therefore include reading from phonetic texts and writing pas sages of the language phonetically as exercises to be corrected by the teacher. The pupil must also be instructed in the use made of length, stress and intonation in the foreign language. These features of the language should be marked as far as practicable in the phonetic transcriptions.

When the learner is unable to find a phonetically trained teacher of the language, he should make himself familiar with the principles of general phonetics, and thus learn to analyse his instructor's speech and reproduce it accurately. If there exists a good book on the phonetics of the language, he should be able to pronounce intelligibly with its aid. Good gramophone records may also be of considerable assistance.

Phonetics Applied to the Teaching of the Mother Tongue. —The "received" form of a language is a kind of foreign language to those who speak dialects or speak with special "accents." The methods of teaching "received" pronunciation are therefore similar to those followed in teaching a foreign language. Some of the sounds of "received" pronunciation will be new to the pupil, and must be taught by means of exercises which his phonetically trained teacher invents to suit his particular needs. His natural pronunciation may also differ from "received" pro nunciation in other respects, and particularly by the use of a different distribution of known sounds, as when a Londoner makes the last syllable of opposite rhyme with might, or when a native of Lancashire gives to the u in butcher the same value as it has in cut. Here phonetic transcriptions are useful for showing the difference of sound.