IATEFL2018: Laura Patsko on creating pronunciation materials

I approached this year's IATEFL conference with a number of personal aims, one of which was to explore the area of pronunciation. So I was pleased that on my very first day at the MaWSIG PCE, Laura Patsko was giving a session on Creating effective pronunciation materials.

As a novice teacher, I remember skipping over the pronunciation activities in the coursebook because I just had no idea what to do with them. Some 25 years on, it's still an area of language teaching that, rather to my shame, I tend to avoid. So when I was recently asked to include pronunciation activities in some materials I was writing, I was very pleased to have Laura to fall back on for feedback and advice. Her comments then proved invaluable and her MaWSIG talk inspired me with even more confidence to tackle pronunciation in the future.

Why teach pronunciation?

Laura started off by talking about why teaching pronunciation is important and explaining that beyond helping students with spoken intelligibility, a focus on pronunciation can help students with other skills too: listening, writing, spelling, etc. There's clearly a link between something like spelling and pronunciation, but even when it comes to grammar and vocabulary, she pointed out that students sometimes avoid producing certain words or structures simply because they find the pronunciation tricky. I know that's something I'm certainly guilty of in other languages I speak!

Market demands vs. market needs

As with other areas of language teaching, pronunciation can throw up a mismatch between what teachers (and students) say they want and what they might actually need. One key issue is the widespread desire from teachers to make their students sound more native-like. But as Laura pointed out that's simply not how most English users speak and it may not even be a desirable model. Whilst accent and intelligibility are linked, they are definitely NOT the same thing. In fact, monolingual native English speakers are often the least intelligible in an international, English as a lingua franca (ELF) context. She suggested that including a variety of voices in materials that are clear but demonstrate different accents would much better prepare students for the kind of English users they might actually encounter in the real world, as well as providing more achievable models. Always having only native speaker, RP models traps teachers and students in an ideological cycle, where it becomes what they expect and demand in their language lessons, regardless of whether it's actually useful. Persuading teachers and students to move away from this though is something of a leap of faith and needs to be backed up with good, solid, supportive teaching materials.

Principles for pronunciation materials

Laura made the following practical suggestions for writing pronunciation activities:

- identify appropriate priorities, especially for students in an ELF context

- identify which market you're writing for and if possible, take into account the L1 of the students as this has a huge influence on pronunciation

- distinguish between receptive and productive contexts and think about moving from reception (raising awareness of pronunciation features) onto production

- include a variety of authentic accents (don't get actors to put on accents!)

- think carefully about the wording of rubrics - instructions like "we say" can be divisive and are often just unnecessary

- make sure that pronunciation is given equal billing to other areas of language. Relegating it to little boxes at the bottom of the page or leaving it out of review sections can give the impression that it's less important and is somehow expendable!

Support for teachers

Many teachers, myself included, avoid pronunciation activities because they're not sure how to deal with them. Laura stressed the importance of providing sufficient support for teachers via teacher's notes. By giving teachers more guidance on how to evaluate pronunciation, what to listen for and give feedback on, and clear explanations of specific pronunciation features, they'll feel more confident about including it in their lessons.

In the final part of Laura's session, we worked through a number of practical activities to get us thinking about how to put together pron materials. I won't share these here because they're all in Laura's fantastic little ebook "How to Write Pronunciation Activities", so you can go and buy it for yourself ... I already have! Also check out her website ELF Pron for more ideas and resources.

Making authentic academic texts manageable

Academic texts are dense and complex and can be tricky for native speakers to read, so for EAP students they present all kinds of challenges. This in turn poses a challenge for EAP materials writers. Do we use absolutely authentic texts because that’s what our students (will) need to deal with, or do we simplify them in some way to make them more manageable?

There are good arguments in favour of using authentic academic texts in EAP materials. As Alexander, Argent & Spencer put it:  “Teachers may be concerned that the content and vocabulary of [authentic] texts will present too many difficulties and should be left to a later stage, but the reality is that, for EAP students, there is no later stage.” (EAP Essentials, 2008). If students are already having to deal with academic texts as part of their studies (or will very soon have to) then it doesn’t make much sense not to tackle similar texts in an EAP class. Indeed, I’ve known former students complain that their EAP course didn’t prepare them for the reality of study in English because it was too easy, making for a shock when they got thrown into their subject courses.

However, using a complex academic text in EAP materials can have drawbacks too:
- students just get lost and confused and end up losing confidence and motivation
- decoding the text becomes a distraction; the teacher ends up spending most of the lesson ‘going through’ the text (whether they intended to or not) and the main focus of the lesson gets rather sidelined

Weighing up these two perspectives is tricky and depends in part on the aim of the materials and the target audience. If you’re working on wider reading skills, a long authentic text might be exactly what you need, whereas if you’re focusing on micro-skills (citation, hedging, vocabulary, or other language features), then it could become an unwanted distraction. Similarly, the level of text that in-sessional students on a discipline-specific (ESAP) course can cope with will be very different from what foundation level, pre-sessional and/or mixed-discipline students will be able to manage.

It’s an issue I came across again in some recent writing work and it prompted me to look back at what I’d said about choosing texts in How to Write EAP Materials. The tactics I suggested there for making authentic academic texts more manageable included:

- use short texts: sometimes a very short text (such as an abstract or a definition) or a short extract from a longer text provides just enough context to illustrate a particular language point

- lower the cognitive load: by choosing texts aimed at high school students (such as A level or IB texts) or very introductory undergraduate texts, you maintain the academic style, but the content is less daunting

- abridge texts: sometimes just taking out a complicated example can make a text easier to understand without losing too much in terms of authenticity

One additional tactic that I’ve been using a lot in the materials I’ve been working on recently is to do a lot of the decoding work for the student. By which I mean that you provide a heavily scaffolded task to get the basic decoding out of the way relatively quickly before moving onto the more specific focus of the lesson. Different options include:

- give students three or four single-sentence summaries of the text and they have to choose the best one (and explain their choice)

- give paraphrases of key points which students have to mark as either true or false, or give a set of paraphrases that students have to put in order to create a summary

- give ‘student’ citations (either written or spoken for variety) which paraphrase key points and students match them to the relevant sections of the original text

By providing simple paraphrases of key points in the first task, you’re doing a lot of the work for the student in getting to grips with the main ideas in the text. This means that you can get onto dealing with the specific focus of the lesson (analysing a particular language feature or working on a micro-skill) more quickly. It also provides useful examples of paraphrasing, introduces some key synonyms and is ‘authentic’ in the sense that it shows students what they might do themselves when citing from a text.

I guess it all comes back to keeping the aim of the lesson in mind. If the aim isn’t to work on understanding a long reading text, but you still need to show the language in context, then find ways to help students through that part so that you can get onto the real goal of the lesson with minimum distraction.

How To Write EAP Materials is available to download as an ebook via Amazon and Smashwords.

EAP2014 Potsdam, Berlin

Last weekend, I had a great trip to Berlin to attend a one-day EAP conference at the University of Potsdam.  I had a really interesting day, chatting to lots of colleagues teaching in the university sector in Germany and learning more about what EAP entails in their context. It’s always fascinating to get different perspectives and I think I took two main points away from the day about EAP in Germany:

-  a lot of EAP teaching is to single-discipline groups (ESAP) , with an expectation that it will use texts/materials from that discipline (a point I’ll come back to below)

- German students have a tendency to overcomplicate their academic writing, trying to produce structures which would be considered ‘elegant’ in German academic style but which just don’t transfer into English. An interesting angle for the focus of language work in this context.

I was there to lead a workshop on the topic of “Writing your own: How to create effective EAP materials”, with ideas taken from my training module for ELT Teacher 2 Writer (How to Write EAP Materials). We started off by looking at a few general ideas and principles to bear in mind when writing your own EAP materials, especially around thinking carefully about your audience (both students and teachers) and your aims.

Then participants worked in groups to come up with ideas to exploit a short text (an abstract from an academic article).  I wasn’t quite sure how it’d go, but everyone did an admirable job of plunging straight into an academic text on a Saturday morning and came up with lots of good ideas and discussion.

For me, one of the most interesting things was that a lot of the groups were very focused on the topic of the text. As an EAP writer, especially writing for mixed-discipline groups, although I do think about the topic of the texts I choose, I’m generally much more focused on the features of academic writing it illustrates (organization, style, language, academic conventions, etc.) – as they relate to my aims for the lesson.  Many of the teachers in the workshop started from the perspective of how the topic of the text would be relevant (or not) to their students and what discussion it might generate. This seemed to link to many of the comments made about teaching single-discipline groups and how difficult it was to work with law/engineering, etc. texts which they (as English teachers) found difficult to understand. I wonder whether this points to lessons dominated by content (revolving around comprehension questions and discussion) rather than general features of English in an academic context? Food for thought perhaps?

We finished off with a look at a few tips and tools to help with writing your own materials and in particular, to help in selecting language to focus on, such as AWL highlighters and one of my favourites tools, the advanced search facilities available on the CD versions of learner’s dictionaries.

I certainly enjoyed the session and found it very interesting to see which points produced the most discussion and comments both during the workshop and in chatting to people afterwards. Thanks so much to everyone who came along and contributed! It’s certainly a topic I’d really like to do more workshops on … now I just have to find a way of financing some more!