January 29th


Times when people wanted to learn a foreign language in order to understand some written texts are already in the past. Nowadays most people wish to know other languages to survive in social situations, and that involves listening and speaking. There was an interesting statistics given: "More than forty percent of our daily communication time is spent on listening, thirty-five percent on speaking, sixteen percent on reading, and only nine percent on writing (Burely-Allen 1995). It is evident that speaking is a more spontaneous mode of language than writing, especially if it is informal. People have less time to think about what to say rather than to write, therefore the language used is less structured. For the same reason listening turns to be a more challenging skill to develope than reading. Beside the time pressure and lack of structure, there are some issues of pronunciation that might hinder mutual understanding. I've heard a lot of jokes about how mispronuncation changed the meaning of the phrase completely: for example 'who are you?' instead of  'how are you?', or 'Where can I bark?' instead of 'Where can I park?' However only few language instructors devote enough time for teaching pronunicaiotn in their class, there is a belief that it should come naturally while listening to authentic materials. The question how good we are at imitating the sounds is a different story. Apart from that, the most widely spread languages have the most varied pronunciation, for example English- we have British accent (Scotish, Welsh), American accent, Australian accent, even Indian accent. Does it mean that pronunciation is not so important? Some researchers raise the question how much one language should deviate from its original one so that it would become a separate language, and it's obvious that differences first start to appear in pronunciation. For example my native language is Lithuanian, but we have different Lithuanian dialects in separate parts of the country, and one of them 'Žemaičių' used to be a separate language in the past. If you come to Lithuania and visit Žemaitija, you will probably not be able to understand anything what they say, mainly because of a heavy accent. By the way, the Lithuanian language is believed to be the most conservative living Indo-European language and you can find more information about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_language So, should we devote more time to teaching pronunciation? This is an open question. In case you are in favor of it, there are some useful websites devoted to pronunciation matters, such as http://www.praat.org and http://www.englishcentral.com/ I have found some interesting sites on developing listening skills as well. Here they are:
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/
http://www.esl-lab.com/
http://ed.ted.com/
Enjoy your time!