Week 14: Final Recording and Reflection

Finals week is approaching, and here is the final blog post for my deliberate practice which I have been doing since the beginning of the semester. In this post, I would like to recall the practices that I have done, note down the progress I made, and evaluate the problems that I still face in learning Received Pronunciation accent. I will also note down the pronunciation features that I have worked on, and the materials, resources, and techniques I used throughout the semester. 

I started my practices focusing on the voice quality setting during the second week because the first week I only described my archetype. During this second week, I learned the posture of our lips, tongue, and jaw when pronouncing British English. I really think that it was a good start for it helped me realize the distinction between the target accent with my daily accent. Therefore, I think I made a good progress compared to my first recording that I posted when presenting my archetype. These five features of Received Pronunciation, namely spread lips, close jaw, creaky voice, falling intonation, and non-rhoticity, are important features to learn if we want to be fluent in British Pronunciation. When trying to understand these features, I found it easier if I had the visual. Thus, I used video trailer from Jane Eyre as the visual since my recording is audio only. By having video, can see the movement of the lips and jaw. The description and examples in the video from bbclearningenglish.com also helped me for this practice.  This video is a good resource video for teaching English phonemes. It is very clear and completer with examples. Here is the video:

However, knowing these features only was not enough for me to be able to speak fluently in Received Pronunciation accent. Therefore, throughout week 3 to week 13, I learned phonological features, both segmental and suprasegmental features, of Received Pronunciation accent, tried to analyze my archetype based on the certain features that I learned during the weeks, and tried to imitate the archetype. I practiced my consonants and vowels during week three and four, trying to focus more in certain consonants and vowels that I found more difficult to pronounce, especially because these phonemes are not exist in my native language. I still used the above video to help me analyze my archetype, and to guide my practice in imitating my archetype. Other features that I learned during my practices were connected speech, stress, prominence, rhythm, and intonation.

I found that I learned a lot by trying to analyze my archetype, and then imitate it. This is a good way of learning pronunciation. I can see the differences in my first recording and my last one even though it is still far from being perfect. I still need to practice more on certain features of English. I could hear the improvement on my production of consonants and vowels even though I still need to improve some phonemes such as the voiced dental fricative /ð/, and the full aspiration of voiceless stops which is distinctive to British English for consonants, and /ɔː/ and some diphthongs for vowels. For learning vowels, I found that learning the differences between North American English and British English has helped me a lot in my practice, and this following Youtube video is particularly useful:

Other than consonants and vowels, I think I made some progress in connected speech and stress even though my production is not very accurate. However, judging from the length of my recording, it can be seen that my effort to connect the last sound of a word with the first sound of the following word works quite well. I also could hear improvement in the stress placements both in word-level and sentence-level stress. The intonation pattern is also improving because of my understanding of stress patterns, prominence, and rhythm.

Thus, I could say that I have learned a lot through this deliberate practice on Received Pronunciation accent. It has given me several practical insights into the teaching and learning of pronunciation especially British English accent. I have found several useful websites and videos that can be good resources to teach pronunciation. Also, the practices of analyzing the archetype has improved my diagnostic skills which can be useful for my future teaching practices.

Here is my final recording:

Finally, if I can do this practice differently, I would like to choose a different kind of archetype, not the one in which the person is reading a story like my current archetype, but rather one with free speech. I feel like I can learn a lot more features if my archetype is a free speech especially on rhythm and intonation I believe. It will be more challenging to analyze I am sure, but it means that I will learn a lot too.  

Week 13: Suprasegmental features_prominence and intonation

This time I tried to focus my practice on prominence and intonation. I read again my blog post for week 8 on prominence and week 9 on intonation trying to recall what I have learned and accomplished, and what I should practice on more. I listened to my recording on intonation several times trying to figure out whether or not I put the prominence on the right words. I also tried to listen to my intonation patterns.

listening to the recording several times, I can hear that I really tried hard to put the prominence on the most important words so that sometimes they do not sound natural. However, I think the overall intonation patterns are quite accurate since there are not many variations in terms of prominence placing and intonation patterns in my archetype since it is only someone reading a story. I guess if the person is telling a story instead of reading it, the intonation would be quite different.

What I learned from my recording this week is that when I focus on some features, I tend to put my attention primarily on these certain features and probably miss some other features. For example, in my recording for week 9, I focused on intonation, so the intonation patterns are quite accurate, but I feel that I was loose in segmental features such as vowels such as /æ/ in began that I pronounced as /bi'gʌn/ and consonants such as /θ/ in north that I pronounced as a glottal stop. I also missed some non-rhotic /r/ as in there, letter, and surprising. 

Here is my recording for this week:

For this recording, I really tried to not only pay attention on prominence and intonation, but still my recording is absolutely not 100% accurate. I think I still missed the /θ/ in north and also some non-rhotic /r/. For me, it is quite a challenge to not pronounce the /r/ sound since the /r/ in my native language, Indonesian, is a flap /r/ in which the /r/ is rolled. Also, I am more exposed to North American English with its rhotic /r/. Thus, if I am not really pay attention to that particular feature while speaking, I will tend to mispronounce it.

Week 12: Suprasegmental features_connected speech, and stress

For this blog post, I have been practicing again my speech paying attention more on the suprasegmental features of the Received Pronunciation accent particularly on the connected speech, and stress. I choose to focus on these features because these will be the bases of my practice next week on prominence, rhythm, and intonation.

Connected Speech

This feature is important to be discussed with L2 learners of English, since in spoken English the words are not produced in isolation to each other. Instead, these words are "run together" which often referred to as connected speech (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010). From my reading on the book, I took notes some of the typical connected speech that occurs in English which I think I should work on in order to enhance my speech. These typical connected speech features are as follows:

• Contractions, blends: they occur when the boundary between two words are blurred. 
• contractions occur when the blurring is conventionalized such as he's for he is or he was and we've for we have. 
• blends occur when the blurring is not conventionalized such as who'll for who will, and there'd for there would. 
• there are also some phrase reductions that commonly occur in spoken English such as gonna for going to, wanna for want to, hafta for have to, and kinda for kind of.

In the archetype I only found one sample of contraction, that is, who'd for who had.

• Linking: it is when native speakers are connecting the sound of one syllable with the sound of the next syllable to avoid the speech being choppy. This may occur between two words or between two syllables within a word.
• insertion of glides
• insertion of /y/ glide following /iy/, /ey/, /ay/, and /ɔy/.
• word-internally: being, staying, crying, toying
• between words: be able, Roy Adams, stay up
• insertion of /w/ glide following /uw/, /ow/, /aw/.
• word-internally: bluish, going, however
• between words: do it, go away, now is

In the archetype, I found some /y/ insertions, that is, in the animal, see it, and the office.

• intervocalic consonant sharing in VC + V sequences:
• keep out → kee͜p͜out
• dream on → drea͜m͜on
• McIntosh apple → McInto͜sh͜appple

In the archetype, there are some intervocalic consonant sharing such as was a veterinary, that area, put on, an official, and letter implied. 

• Resyllabification in CC + V sequences: this occur when a word or syllable ending in a consonant cluster (CC) followed by a word or syllable with a vowel sound in its initial position. The final consonant of the cluster is often pronounced as part of the following syllable, such as in
• lef/t͜arm 
• wep/t͜over
• hat/s͜off
• adapt͜able

I found three resyllabifications in the archetype: district of, herself in, and picked up.

• lengthened articulation of consonant with geminate consonants: this occur when the final consonant sound of a word is identical with the initial consonant sound of the following word. The two consonant sounds are then pronounced as one single, elongated articulation of the consonant. They are not produced twice. 
• stop pushing [pː]
• rob Bill [bː]
• quick cure [kː]
• less serious [sː]   

I found two lengthened consonants in my archetype: deserted district, and street tower.

• unreleased consonant in stop + stop or stop + affricate sequences: this occurs when a stop consonant is followed by another stop or affricate. The first stop is not released to facilitate the linking.
• pet cat
• soap dish
• blackboard
• good jury

• Assimilation: this occurs when a given sound takes on the characteristics of a neighboring sound. The assimilated sounds can either precedes or follows the conditioning sounds, or two sounds influence each other (reciprocal) 
• plural form /s/ versus /z/ which is influenced by the precedings sound, whether it is voiced or voiceless.
• bags → /g/ is voiced → /baeg → z/
• backs → /k/ is voiceless → /baek → s/
•  -d ending in past and past progressive 
• moved → /v/ is voiced → /muwv → d/
• fished  → /ʃ/ is voiceless → /fiʃ → t/
• in grandpa, the /p/ causes /nd/ to be pronounced as /m/

for this practice, I focused only on these three features since these three are the connected speech features that I noticed in my archetype.

Stress

For the stress part, I practiced both word-level and sentence-level stress, paying attention to the reduced vowel as well as prominence. I re-used my transcription for my post on stress and prominence for the practice this time. I need to do my practice on stress again since I realize that this feature is not present in my native language, but it is an important features of English. So I find the need to always practice it over and over again. 

After several times practicing, and several attempts recording my speech, here is the recording for this week:

Next week, I will focus my practice on prominence, rhythm, and intonation. 

Week 11: Segmental feature_vowels

On my last blog post, I discussed my practice on consonants. This time, I will focus my practice on vowels of Received Pronunciation accent. The same as with consonants, I feel like my vowels are still not really accurate. Therefore, I tried to practice again. I still used the same website that I used to practice my consonants, that is, BBC Learning English. I also practiced by imitating the words from the videos until I was sure that I imitate them accurately (at least based on my listening).

My first attention was on the low back vowel as in the words job, north, and dog. I learned from the video in the above website and also the video that I embedded on my fourth week blog post that in order to produce this vowel sound in RP accent, the lips are rounded which is different from NAE accent in which the lip is not rounded but the jaw is dropped. Also, I focused my practice on the vowels that are lengthened due to the non-rhotic /r/ sound in RP. If the vowels are preceding /r/, the vowels become longer since the /r/ is dropped such as in the words nurse, work, there, and superb.

Here is my recording after practicing several times:

For the next practice, I will focus on suprasegmental features of the Received Pronunciation accent. 

Week 10: Segmental feature_consonants

So far, I have trained myself to speak with the Received Pronunciation accent for more than 9 weeks, but I still feel that my accent is not close enough to this British accent. Thus, I decided to go back and repeat practicing again focusing on the segmental features, especially on the consonants for this blog post. I found the best website to practice with since it has a pronunciation part with videos covering both the consonants and also the vowels. However, for this time I will only focus my practice on consonants. I will practice more on the vowel afterward.

I decided to practice my consonants again after I listened again all my recordings from week one to week 9, and I realized that along the way as my focus shifted to the suprasegmental features, my control over the segmental features was loosened. BBC Learning English is the webpage that I used to practice my consonants again. I watched the video and repeat after it when prompted. I did it several times for each consonant to make sure that I produced similar sounds.

As I read through my notes on week three, I did some more practices on certain consonants that are the salient features of British accent. I worked on my non-rhotic /r/ for I tend to pronounce my /r/. I also worked on dental fricatives /ð/ and /θ/ especially the /θ/ in the word North which I do not know why I almost always pronounced it as a glottal stop. I also worked on the plosives in the voiceless stops /p/, /t/, /k/ tried to make sure that I always pronounce them correctly and clearly. Glottal stops were also one of main focuses during my practice since I sometimes forgot to produce these sounds instead of /t/ and /k/. I also practiced pronouncing the velarized /ɫ/ at the end of a syllable in the words sentimental, feel, and beautiful.

Here is my recording after practicing for several times:

When I listened to this video again, I can hear that I put to much effort in pronouncing some of the consonants because I wanted to pronounce them correctly, so that they do not feel so natural. For example, when I am pronouncing the word north, I can hear that it took me longer to pronounce the final syllable /θ/ because I wanted to make sure that I pronounced it correctly. Through more practice on these consonants, however, I am sure that they will come more naturally. For the next blog post, I will focus on the vowel.

Week 9: Intonation

For this week, I focus my deliberate practice on intonation in Received Pronunciation. The same as prominence, intonation is also used by native speakers of English to emphasize important information in their utterances. Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) highlight that prominence and intonation is actually interact with each other in that the change of prominence in an utterance also changes the intonation pattern of the utterance. Before I started my practice, I reviewed the theories about intonation first for it would make it easier for me to hear it. 

Talking about intonation means talking about pitch, which Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) put it as "the relative highness or lowness of the speaker's voice"  similar to musical pitch do, re, and mi (p.230). They distinguish 4 levels of pitch in English:

4 = extra high
3 = high
2 = middle
1 = low 

Usually, level 4 pitch is only used when someone has a strong feeling of something such as when she/he is surprised, enthusiastic, or in disbelief; and it is also often used in contrastive and emphatic stress. One alternates from low to high pitch, but she/he usually ends the utterance either using low or high pitch. One thing that I thing should be noted here is that intonation in English does not change the meaning of the word, unlike tonal language such as Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese in which the same word with different tone will carry different meaning. Instead, in English, changes in intonation will only reflect different discourse context of the utterance or even simply a word. The following example can help our understanding on pitch and intonation:

Question:    Now? --> produced with rising pitch signifies a question
Command:  Now! --> produced with falling pitch signifies a command

or 

Statement:   She's gone --> produced with falling pitch signifies a statement
Question:     She's gone --> produced with rising pitch signifies a question

People can also use intonation to show they emotion. The examples given by Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) are different emotion that can be shown with the word great as follows:

perfunctory  --> produced with only slightly falling intonation or neutral
enthusiasm  --> produced with broader movement from high to low intonation
sarcasm      --> flatter intonation that may signify disinterest, or even sarcasm

When analyzing my archetype, I realized that the woman in my archetype mostly employed the intonation pattern for statement since she is reading a story of out a text. Here is my transcription for her intonation patterns:

and here is my recording for this week after several practice on intonation patterns:

For next week, I will focus my practice on the segmental features or Received Pronunciation. 

Week 7: Rhythm

For this blog post, I focus on the rhythm of Received Pronunciation after my practice on word-level and sentence-level stresses last week. Working on English stress was not an easy thing for me to do since stress is not a significant feature in my native language, Indonesian. Indonesian is a syllable-timed language in which the length of an utterance depends more or less on the number of syllables in the utterance for each syllable has a fairly regular stress, whereas English is a stress-timed language in which the length of an utterance does not depend on the number of the syllables but rather on the number of stresses. Therefore, in English it is possible to have a sentence which has the same stress pattern as a multisyllabic word. These examples from Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010) provide good illustration on the similarities between the stress pattern of multisyllabic words with simple sentences:

Reflecting back to my previous recordings, I found out that most of my recordings are longer than my archetype which show that my pronunciation is still very much influenced by my native language especially on the stress pattern I assume. I probably still pronounced unstressed syllables longer than they should be. Thus, the practice on rhythm that I have been doing this week will be beneficial for me in enhancing my English pronunciation.

I started my deliberate practice by reading theories on rhythm first since I did not remember learning this specifically in college during my bachelor degree program. Discussion on rhythm is closely related to word and sentence level stresses in that rhythm is a combination of beat patterns of strongly stressed, lightly stressed and unstressed syllables and pauses (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010). In other words, it involves stressing and de-stressing of syllables to create the musicality of the language. I learned that Native speakers of English rely on the distinction between these stressed and unstressed syllables when listen to people in that they focus more on the stressed syllables to get the meaning of the utterances. Therefore, failure to produce them correctly may hinder their understanding on the utterances. Thus, I realize that it is really important to learn the stress patterns of English as well as to teach these stress-timed nature or rhythm of English to EFL learners. The stressed-timed nature of English is well illustrated in this following figures from Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin (2010), and I found them useful for my drilling practices:

 From these two figures, it can be seen that even though these sentences have different number of syllables, they have roughly the same length of time to pronounce since they have the same number of stressed elements. The consequence of this is the length of time to pronounce each stressed syllable is different in order to accommodate the unstressed syllables. Also, it can be seen that native speakers of English usually put stress on content words (words that carry information) and leave the function words (words that signify grammatical relationships) unstressed. These videos also helped me to understand rhythm in English better:

and

Then, I read the transcription of my archetype again, and put the stress patterns on it. Even though it took me sometime to finally finish putting of the stress patterns on my transcription, I found that it was easier for me to understand the nature of this rhythm because I already work on the word-level and sentence-level stresses. Here is my transcription:

The smallest dots show the unstressed syllables; the medium-sized dots show the stressed syllables, and the biggest dots show the sentence-level stress or the stressed words in sentences. When I tried to record myself for the first time after practicing this rhythm patterns, I found it more challenging since I was more aware of rhythm patterns, and I tried to be as precise as possible, but it turned out to be too exaggerating. Here is the result of my recording after several trials:

It is not perfect yet, but I am sure with more practice it will get better. For the next blog post, I will focus my practice on the prominence.    

References:

Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D.M., & Goodwin, J.M. (2010). Teaching pronunciation: A course book 

         and reference guide (2nd Ed). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.