jenifer jenkins: which pronunciatin norms

Which pronunciation normsand models for English as anInternational Language?

Jennifer Jenkins

The recent growth in the use of English as an International Language (EIL)has led to changes in learners' pronunciation needs and goals. Theacquisition of a native-like accent is no longer the ultimate objective of themajority of learners, nor is communication with native speakers theirprimary motivation for learning English. Instead, what they need above allis to be able to communicate successfully with other non-native speakersof English from different L1 backgrounds. This article proposes that withEnglish assuming the position of the world's major lingua franca, a radicalrethink is called for in terms of the role of pronunciation and its aims withinthe ELT curriculum. In particular, there is an urgent need to consider thequestion of which pronunciation norms and models are most appropriatefor classes aiming to prepare learners for interaction in EIL contexts, and toraise teachers' awareness of the issues involved.

Introduction: the Some years ago, Kachru (1988: 3) described six fallacies about 'the usersbasic conflict and uses of English across cultures'. According to his sixth fallacy, 'the

diversity and variation in English are indicators of linguistic decay;restriction of the decay is the responsibility of native scholars and of ESLprograms'. This fallacy, argued Kachru, 'has resulted in the position that'deviation' at any level from the native norm is 'an error'.

Many of us working in the field of pronunciation have moved onconceptually from this position. We no longer regard English as beingtaught mainly for communication with its native speakers (the goal ofEFL), or the target of pronunciation teaching as a native-like accent,with the eradication of all traces of a 'foreign' accent, howeverunrealistic that target always was. We acknowledge that the EFL-ESLdistinction is beginning to blur as the two merge into English as anInternational Language (EIL). Nowadays English most frequentlyserves as a worldwide lingua franca for its vast numbers of non-nativeusers, and as Widdowson (1994) so forcefully argues, it is no longer theproperty of its native speakers. However, faced with a lack of clear-cutalternatives, we have not been able to move on in any practical way; andthis situation has been compounded by the relative neglect thatpronunciation teaching has suffered in ELT curricula since the adventof communicative approaches, within whose paradigms it does not sitcomfortably. As a result, the position that Kachru described is stilllargely that adopted by teacher educators around the world, andconsequently by classroom teachers themselves.

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Two main obstacles prevent the conceptual progress outlined abovefrom being translated into classroom practice. The first is the difficulty inresolving the basic conflict between the practical need to harmonizepronunciation among L2 varieties of English sufficiently to preserveinternational intelligibility; the second is the social and psychologicalneed to respect the norms of the largest group of users of English, i.e.non-natives. So while it is now becoming conceivable for us to dispensewith the idea that local non-native norms are wholly inappropriate, andthat every pronunciation which differs from a native variety is deviant,clear specific pronunciation goals for teaching EIL are thin on theground.

Possible solutions Two main approaches to the conflict have emerged. The first is anattempt to establish some sort of simplified, neutral, universalpronunciation variety, intelligible and acceptable to both native andnon-native users of English—the phonological equivalent of Quirk's'Nuclear English' (1981), which endeavoured to do this for syntax andmorphology. An example of this is Ginison's 'rudimentary internationalpronunciation' (1978: 51). Gimson reduced the phonemic inventory ofEnglish, i.e. 24 consonant sounds and 20 vowel sounds, to 14 and 15respectively. The following is typical of the result:

'tens 'fok 'nau 'kafars 9a 'ho:l af 'saGarn 'mklant, wiG fisa'pilati at a'maksimam af 'e:ti 'mi:tars

which, transcribed, is:

Dense fog now covers the whole of southern England, with visibility at amaximum of eighty metres.

Of course, few English speakers, native or non-native, would find thissort of thing either intelligible or acceptable, particularly as regards theloss of the voicing distinction for consonants such that, for example,'dense' is pronounced 'tense'. Equally problematic is the fact thatalthough such schemes cannot be totally dismissed, it would beextremely difficult to impose constraints in this way. Without the helpof international pronunciation police, one could not force people eitherto acquire such forms in the first place, or to maintain them withoutelaboration in their subsequent interactions. Influences such as theBritish and American media, local norms, and group identity are likelyto intervene to varying degrees to prevent success among either nativeor non-native users of EIL. Any neutral, universal forms of Englishpronunciation, simplified or otherwise, will therefore probably have tobe unplanned, developing naturally from 'below' rather than beingimposed from 'above', as seems to be happening at present, albeit on asmaller scale, among the different English accents of Singapore.

The second and potentially more promising approach to solving theconflict is that of variationists such as Pennington, whose recent (1996)book on English phonology, subtitled 'An International Approach',advocates the provision of multiple models, both native and non-native,

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and the teaching of generalized norms according to individual learnerneed and choice, rather than a narrow focus on a standard British orAmerican accent.

For the present, at least, neither type of approach solves the growingconflict between global intelligibility and local norms in EIL. Thissituation is exacerbated by the fact that remarkably little research hasbeen conducted into the intelligibility of English among its non-nativespeakers from different Lls, be they fluent bilinguals (for whom theepithet 'bilingual speaker of English' seems rather more appropriate than'non-native': see Jenkins 1996a) or, far more commonly, those speakerswho have interlanguages (hence 'non-bilingual speakers of English') andare, by definition, engaged in 'interlanguage talk' when they use Englishto interact with one another. These latter speakers are, of course, mymajor concern, since they are the ones who fill our classrooms, and whosepronunciation is likely to provide an obstacle to successful internationalcommunication.

Intelligibility inEIL vs. EFL

contexts

A compromisesolution

Because of the dearth of research on English used among its non-nativespeakers, the majority of published materials on pronunciation, whethertheoretical or for classroom use, tend to focus exclusively onintelligibility for the native rather than the non-native receiver. Thisresearch focus on the native receiver provides important insights intothe way native speakers of English structure and decode spokenmessages via the suprasegmental system (stress, rhythm, and intona-tion) and, as such, constitutes an essential source of information forthose learning English in order to communicate with its native speakers.However, the assumption that these findings can be applied wholesaleto non-native lingua franca contexts is dubious. While it is almostundoubtedly true that the suprasegmentals contribute far more than thesegmentals (sounds) to intelligibility for the native receiver, complicat-ing factors in interlanguage talk make it necessary to maintain a balancebetween the segmentals and suprasegmentals in teaching where thelearner's goal is to be effective in EIL rather than in EFL (native/non-native) contexts.

For the purposes of promoting intelligibility through teaching EIL, whileat the same time allowing speakers the freedom to express themselvesthrough their own pronunciation norms, I suggest the followingapproach: we should concentrate the productive focus of pronunciationteaching on the three areas that appear to have the greatest influence onintelligibility in EIL, i.e. certain segmentals, nuclear stress (the mainstress in a word group), and the effective use of articulatory setting, tothe extent that it underpins the first two areas. Other aspects ofpronunciation can then be dealt with purely at a receptive level.

We will now look in greater detail at this proposal for an EILpronunciation syllabus, taking each of the three productive areas in turnand then going on to consider the receptive areas.

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Segmentals The crucial difference between a non-native speaker of English and anative speaker (or fluent bilingual) as regards segmentals, is that thenon-native may deviate from native models in precisely those soundsthat are considered to be 'core' sounds of English, and thereforeessential to approximate closely because they figure in all nativevarieties. This core quality applies to most consonant sounds and to thedistinction between long and short vowel sounds, and can be extendedto methods of cluster simplification, particularly consonant deletion—forexample, the deletion of HI when it is the middle of three consonants,such that 'postman' is pronounced /pausman/. (See Jenner 1989, Jenkins1996b for further discussion of the 'common core'.) As well as deviatingfrom native models in these areas, non-native speakers often deviatedifferently from each other because of LI transfer.

Where non-core sounds are concerned we are, for EIL purposes, in therealm of acceptable L2 regional norms—non-standard, butnevertheless non-deviant. This applies generally to vowel quality(provided it is consistent), which varies widely among native varieties,and to the consonants /9/ and Id/, which do not occur in the majority ofthe world's languages, or even in some native English varieties. Coresounds are a different matter altogether. While accurate productiondoes not of itself guarantee intelligibility or signal meaning, ininterlanguage talk lack of accurate production often has the oppositeeffect, that is, it obstructs meaning by distracting or even opening uppossibilities of a different message. This is chiefly because the receiverin interlanguage talk tends to use more bottom-up processing, and tohave a narrower band of allophonic (phonetic) tolerance and a reducedlexical repertoire, as compared with a native speaker or fluentbilingual; paradoxically, the effect can be compounded by the correctplacement of nuclear stress on the syllable containing the deviant coresound or consonant deletion.

Nuclear stress

122

Accurate use of nuclear stress is essential in EIL because learners seemto acquire the native English system relatively quickly for receptivepurposes, but do not acquire it productively until considerably later, if atall. This applies particularly to contrastive stress, through which Englishtypically highlights 'extra' meanings by moving the nucleus from the lastcontent word to another word in the group. (For example, in 'Myhusband drinks a lot of wine', the most usual position for nuclear stress ison 'wine', whereas if this stress was shifted to 'husband', some othercontrastive meaning, such as 'but / don't', would be established.) Thethorough, systematic teaching of the nuclear stress system wouldundoubtedly go some way to rectifying the learner's receptive-productive mismatch. However, until pronunciation is given a higherpriority in the classroom, such an outcome is unlikely to be widespread,and the effect of a misplaced nucleus, particularly in combination with adeviant core sound, will continue to be potentially disastrous for EILcommunication.

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Articulatory setting

Areas open tovariation

Word stress

Features ofconnected speech

Rhythm

Mastery in this area will both facilitate the production of core soundsand allow the speaker to manipulate these sounds to produce nuclearstress, i.e. to lengthen sounds, change pitch on them, and utter them withgreater volume. If the articulators are not comfortably positioned, suchmanoeuvres will prove difficult, if not impossible, whereas 'concentrat-ing on this holistic aspect of pronunciation . . . makes it easier to allowsuprasegmental and segmental aspects to work in unison' (Dalton andSeidlhofer 1994a: 142).

The three phonological areas discussed above have the advantage ofbeing not only teachable but also learnable: systematic, and not riddledwith complicated exceptions and fine distinctions, or dependent onindividual learners and contexts (for more on teachability andlearnability see Dalton and Seidlhofer 1994a: 72^4). On the otherhand, most other aspects of phonology are neither easily learnable nornecessary for most EIL contexts. Thus, EIL should be able to embracenon-native local norms and/or disregard native norms with no threat tointelligibility for the (non-native) receiver in at least the followingareas:

The rules are highly complex, containing manifold exceptions anddifferences among LI varieties and according to syntactic context. Somewords, e.g. 'controversy', 'ice-cream', even have optional stress patternswithin Received Pronunciation (RP), the standard British pronuncia-tion. Reliable rules therefore cannot be easily formulated, let alonelearnt.

These include elision, assimilation, linking, and weak forms. Thesuggestion that learners can safely abandon weak forms (the productionof words like 'to' and 'from' as /ta/ and /fram/ in fast speech) will nodoubt prove controversial. However, I would argue that it is possible tohighlight some syllables without necessarily reducing others, and thatsome native varieties do precisely this, along with the vast majority offluent bilingual speakers. Lack of weak forms may prove disconcertingfor some native receivers, but is unlikely to do so for non-natives.

While English is relatively stress-timed, with stresses occurring onimportant syllables in the speech stream at roughly equal intervals, mostof the world's languages tend towards varying degrees of syllable-timing.While it will always be necessary to retain nuclear stress on the mostimportant syllable of a word group, because English is relativelyrestricted syntactically and morphologically in its capacity to highlightimportant aspects of a message in other ways, this does not mean thatstress-timing is essential in any strict sense. In fact, rigid stress-timing isno more than a convenient fiction for classroom practice and, if DavidCrystal's (1996) tentative prediction is correct, English may be movingtowards the syllable-timed end of the stress/syllable-timing continuum,under the influence of other world languages in general and of rap musicin particular.


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Implications forteacher education

The differencebetween a model

and a norm

Thus, while approximation to the native model is probably essential forintelligibility in non-bilingual EIL contexts as regards core sounds,nuclear stress, and relevant articulatory setting, local non-native normsare likely to be both acceptable and intelligible in many otherphonological areas. This solution to the conflict involved in the selectionof pronunciation goals for EIL offers teachers and learners the best ofboth worlds: a universal, realistically teachable and learnable core, basedon the native model ('model' being singular in the sense that thedesignated areas are common to all native varieties), which can then befleshed out according to a wide range of acceptable, local non-nativenorms.

If such an approach to the teaching of pronunciation is to be adopted inthe EIL classroom, teachers will require substantial awareness-raisingand practical preparation. In particular, teacher education programmeswill need to prioritize two issues: first, the difference between a modeland a norm and, second, the fact and acceptability of L2 sociolinguisticvariation.

According to Dalton and Seidlhofer (1994b: 27), 'if we treat RP and/orGeneral American as a norm, we connect them strongly with ideas ofcorrectness. The norm is invariable and has to be imitated independentlyof any considerations of language use. The aim, however unrealistic, is100 per cent attainment of the norm, which is regarded as an end initself. On the other hand, 'if we treat RP and/or General American as amodel, we use them as points of reference and models for guidance. Wedecide to approximate to them more or less according to the demands ofa specific situation'.

Thus, instead of treating a native norm as the goal for production, as hasgenerally been the case hitherto, teachers should be made aware thatthis is neither a desirable nor, in fact, a likely outcome. They can beshown how to use a native model as a point of reference to prevent localnon-native varieties from moving too far apart from each other, as wellas to promote receptive competence in interaction with native speakers.However, for active use and correction, they can be directed towardsfocusing on the comfortable production of core sounds and nuclearstress, and on the rules governing nuclear placement, but otherwise toaccept, indeed, to promote the use of LI norms.

Nevertheless, the demands of 'the specific situation' of classroomteaching are such that non-native teachers will, themselves, still berequired to develop the ability to approximate more closely than theirstudents to a standard native model. This will enable them to provide theclassroom exposure that is necessary to provide 'points of reference andmodels for guidance', thus preventing local norms from diverging too farfrom each other and resulting in international unintelligibility. Inaddition, teachers, whether native or non-native, will also be requiredfrom time to time to satisfy the minority of learners who desire to followthe EFL rather than the EIL route, and achieve more or less native-like


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proficiency. Again, the teacher's ability to approximate closely to astandard native model will be essential to this end. In this context, it isimportant to emphasize that we should all guard against politicalcorrectness, in the sense of telling our learners what their goals shouldbe: in particular that they should not want to sound like native speakersif they clearly wish to do so.

All teachers, native and non-native, will need to be well educated in thethree core phonological areas, i.e. sounds, nuclear stress, and articu-latory setting. They will need a thorough grounding in how and wheresounds and stress are produced, in the rules for elision as they relate toacceptable and non-acceptable consonant deletion, and in the nuclearplacement system. They will also need to be well informed as to howtheir learners do these things in their Lls, so that they can introducecontrastive work into the classroom as a means of enhancing productivecompetence. It is a current irony that although pronunciation teachingtends to be marginalized throughout the ELT world, it is non-nativeteachers who are generally the better versed in all these areas, and thusthe better prepared to embark on teaching pronunciation for EIL.

L2 sociolinguistic Phonological variation, whether LI or L2, can be both inter- and intra-variation speaker. Before teachers are likely to promote L2 inter-speaker

variation in the classroom, they will need to experience a change ofattitude towards it and, in turn, be equipped with the means of changingtheir students' attitudes (and this includes native-speaker students,possibly at secondary school level). Such an attitude change amongteachers will best be effected by the introduction into teacher educationcourses of a sociolinguistics component dealing specifically with thesocial and psychological issues involved in accent variation. Translatedinto pedagogy, inter-speaker variation implies the inclusion of extensiveexposure to different L2 varieties of English, particularly in the form ofcontrastive work, to make the differences salient for learners, and thusto enhance their receptive competence for EIL.

Intra-speaker variation in an EIL context refers to the fact that non-native speakers may be motivated to accommodate their non-nativereceivers when their own desire to be understood is especially strong.This accommodation is expressed particularly in the suppression ofthose features of LI transfer (often relating to core sounds) that havethe potential to obstruct meaning for a specific receiver (cf. Jenkins1996c). It can be elicited especially by means of information exchangetasks between learners from different LI backgrounds. However,teachers need to be made aware that suppression of LI transfer throughaccommodation cannot be expected to occur in any task type, orbetween learners from the same LI background.

Clearly, then, both types of variation can be embraced more easily inmultilingual than in monolingual classrooms, which involve highexposure to a single non-native variety and lack any genuinecommunicative need to use English or improve pronunciation for


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intelligibility. Moreover, these last two factors sometimes seem toengender a degree of embarrassment about approximating closely to theL2 model in front of the peer group, especially in the case of adolescentlearners. Paradoxically, it is also more difficult to convince both teachersand their learners from monolingual settings that L2 variation isacceptable for EIL. Lacking an international context for learning, theinclination tends to be towards EFL rather than EIL, regardless of thefuture uses to which the learners will put their English. In addition toreforming the pronunciation syllabus, two major tasks for EIL over thecoming decades are, therefore, to reposition the crucial pedagogical areaof pronunciation centre-stage rather than in the wings, and to makemultilingual classes available wherever in the world English is taughtand learned in order to serve as an international lingua franca.

Received February 1997

ReferencesCrystal, D. 1996. 'The past, present and future of

English rhythm'. Speak Out! 18: 8-13.Dalton, C. and B. Seidlhofer. 1994a. Pronuncia-

tion.- Oxford: Oxford University Press.Dalton, C. and B. Seidlhofer. 1994b. 'Is pronun-

ciation teaching desirable? Is it feasible?' inT. Sebbage and S. Sebbage (eds.). Proceedingsof the 4th International NELLE Conference.Hamburg: NELLE.

Gimson, A.C. 1978. 'Towards an internationalpronunciation of English' in P. Strevens (ed.). InHonour of A.S. Hornby. Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press.

Jenkins, J. 1996a. 'Native speaker, non-nativespeaker and English as a Foreign Language:time for a change'. IATEFL Newsletter 131:10-11.

Jenkins, J. 1996b. 'Changing priorities for success-ful communication in international contexts'.Speak Out! 17: 15-22.

Jenkins, J. 1996c. 'Changing priorities'. SpeakOut! 18: 33^0.

Jenner, B. 1989. 'Teaching pronunciation: thecommon core'. Speak Out! 4: 2-4.

Kachru, B. 1988. 'Teaching World Englishes'.ERIC/CLL News Bulletin 12/1: \-A.

Pennington, M.C. 1996. Phonology in EnglishLanguage Teaching. London: Longman.

Quirk, R. 1981. 'International communication andthe concept of 'nuclear English' in L. Smith(ed.). English for Cross-cultural Communi-cation. London: Macmillan.

Widdowson, H.G. 1994. 'The ownership ofEnglish'. TESOL Quarterly 28/2: 377-89.

The authorJennifer Jenkins is Head of Teacher Educationand Lecturer in Applied Linguistics in the EnglishLanguage Teaching Centre and the Departmentof English Language and Literature, King'sCollege London. She has a PhD in TESOL fromthe Institute of Education, University of London.Before taking up her present position, she taughtEFL, ESL, and EAP for many years in a range oflanguage schools, adult education institutes, anduniversities. Her current interest is the role ofinterlanguage phonology in English as an Inter-national Language, the subject of a forthcomingbook with Oxford University Press.E-mail: <[email protected]>


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