Teachers are always interested in how to deal with the specific pronunciation problems created by the ‘grip’ of the mother tongue phonetic set of their students. So for example in Palestine teachers wanted to explore, amongst other things, the confusion between /p/ and /b/, as discussed in the post before last. Or in Poland last Saturday teachers wanted to look at /θ/ and /ð/. I enjoy doing this and it is useful, but in the holistic approach to sounds which I try to encourage, where one sees all the sounds of a language as a single system in which they all interact with and influence each other, there is another approach that also needs to be brought to bear, and that is how the physicality of a given sounds relates to any of the other sounds that are made in a similar way or in a nearby part of the mouth. This systemic view becomes apparent only once one starts to discover in one’s own tongue, lips, mouth and voice (ie in one’s muscles not in theory or in thoughts) how the sounds originate. That insight is what my series “The Story of Sounds” aims to bring about.

As I keep saying in all these posts, my starting point is that unless you also focus on the physical, all strategies will be undermined or at least limited. So the question arises, “Well how do you get students to focus on the physical?” And since this also came up in Poland and Palestine I’d like to offer an adapted excerpt from my 3^rd posting on this blog about 18 months ago, talking about finding the ‘muscle buttons’…

When you learn sport or dance you become more attentive to subtle muscular movements that you may not be aware of in ordinary activities. This is an aspect of proprioception, the internal kinesthetic awareness of the position and movement of our muscles and parts of the body. Pronunciation is no different from dance. Here too we must help students connect with the muscles that make the difference. So, one of my first tasks during the first lessons with a new class (beginners, intermediate or advanced, teacher or student, native or non-native English speaker, it’s all the same) is to help them (re-) discover the main muscles that make the pronunciation difference, to locate the internal buttons that trigger the muscle movements. I do this starting with the vowels (you can see and hear this at this Macmillan webinar). At the beginning it is enough to help students identify 4 such buttons (physically as well as cognitively) which enable them to get around the mouth and consciously find new positions of articulation. These muscle buttons are:

1. Tongue (moving forward and back)

2. Lips (spreading and bringing back, or rounding and pushing forward)

3. Jaw + tongue (moving them up and down)

4. Voice (turning it on or off, to make voiced or unvoiced sounds)

This is the basic muscle kit you need to navigate round vowels and diphthongs, and it also transfers neatly to consonants and gets you round most of them.

If this interests you, then take a few minutes to check out the Story of Sounds episodes in this blog. Then if you are still interested, follow them very closely, do the activities, and see how you begin to develop a much more precise sense of how you make and move between sounds, and only then do you really start to see what you have to do to help your students, and how you could do it.