Abstract:

Teaching pronunciation as part of foreign language instruction is no novelty in itself. On the other hand, at the times of intensive international collaboration triggered by the economic integration, cultural exchange and, during the last year, by the necessity to collectively confront the COVID-2019 pandemic, foreign language skills are in great demand. Innovative approaches to a practice of long standing may change the traditional view of what is the best way to teach spoken English.

The paper deals with innovative teaching methodology based on a systemic contrastive analysis of the students’ native language and the foreign language they are learning. Traditional pronunciation teaching appears in most cases to be targeted at foreign speakers per se, without taking into account the particular languages the students may speak as their native tongues. The systemic phonological approach suggested in the paper requires detailed comparison of sound systems of L1 and L2, including distinctive features of phonemes, their variation and distribution, as well as word stress patterns, intonation contours and rhythmic organization of speech.

Though there is a wealth of materials for teaching American English pronunciation, practically none of those are specifically devised with the view of teaching Russian speakers. This generally means that they contain information and learning activities superfluous for speakers of Russian and lack those absolutely necessary for overcoming the Russian accent and avoiding perception difficulties. The comparative study of the phonological systems of both languages (Kurath, 1964; Carley, Mees, 2020; Бондарко, 1977; Гиржева, 2020) undertaken by the authors suggests that Russian learners, when acquiring the pronunciation of English consonants should focus, first and foremost, on the distinctive feature fortis/lenis (not voiceless/voiced) and the absence of the soft/hard feature in English. Special attention is to be paid to such distribution peculiarity of English consonants as regular appearance of (devoiced) lenis consonants in word-final position and to the long and short allophones of sonorants. “Exotic” stop allophones, such as the glottal stop and the flap, should be introduced at the early stages of the course as they alter the sound form of words against Russian learners’ expectations and may impede understanding. Purely articulatory consonantal characteristics (such as the apical character of /t, d/, etc.) can be studied later as they have no or little bearing on perception and comprehension of English speech (Шамина, Суховалов, 2018).

The systemic approach may be claimed to be more “economical” in terms of time and effort given by students to acquiring particular phonetic phenomena of the foreign language than the traditional way where learners are exposed to explanations, drills and exercises notwithstanding differences or similarities between their native tongue and the language they study. With the systemic approach, students are supposed to learn about, practice and acquire only those phonetic features of the foreign language that are conspicuously different from those in their own language and, if misinterpreted or neglected, can lead to a communication failure. The methodology can be used for different age groups and at all stages of phonetic skill acquisition: recognition, imitation, contrasting, controlled use, etc.

Keywords:

American English, Russian learners, teaching methodology, phonetic systems, consonants.