English Pronunciation

[ceruleancat]

A poem dedicated to the paths of English pronunciation,
although clearly the author was intending to confuse and bewilder more than to teach.

http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2011/12/23/english-pronunciation/

This entry was originally posted at http://ceruleancat.

Comments

[ferneberga]

That's a classic, I doubt whether any of my students past or present could read that out loud. Apart from translation I've been tutoring English as a foreign language for over 30 years and know it's pretty much a lost case unless people have started foreign language learning at a very young age.

[ceruleancat]

Like I said, this poem, not intended to help with the learning, in structure and in lexical choices. Some of the words here would be unknown to native speakers as well.

After years of teaching linguistics, I can say that one of the hardest misconceptions for them to get rid of is the sound-spelling correlation, the fact that spelling is no more than a vague guide, a set of clues to pronunciation rather than a representation. And for some reason the most resistant tended to be the monolingual English speakers, mostly American.

SL lost cause or not rather depends on degree of mastery aimed for as well as age, learning situation and personal factors. I've known cases to get an accent relatively well although learning at a later age, while others who've adopted the weirdest phonological quirks that are influenced neither by their native tongue nor by the target accent.

[ferneberga]

You're absolutely right there; not to mention English dictionaries always come provided with phonetics, whereas Spanish for example don't. My students are native Spanish speakers who are always throwing in my face that Spanish is a phonetic language, not that, that makes it any easier, given the pig's ear a lot of native English speakers make of it