November 22
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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Piers Messum, who teaches in London and did his dissertation a few years ago on the role of imitation in learning to pronounce. The interview helps to explain why the current approach to the teaching of pronunciation has yielded such poor results for most learners. If you have an interest in improving your pronunciation or understanding why you have struggled with it in the past, listen in!
While this interview below concentrates on the sound quality (phonemic) aspect of pronunciation, a second one, which we will soon do, will look at learning things like stress, timing and melody.
In this 20 minute interview you will gain real insights as to how we learn pronunciation and what we need to do and not do to improve our outcomes.
In the interview Piers refers to a practical reference book that can help you with your pronunciation. Its full title is: A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, by J. C. Catford. This book is a very thorough look at pronunciation, including unique practical exercises whereby learners can explore and hence learn to recognise what is needed to modify the sounds they make. It is a very comprehensive book that would suit language learners committed to improving their pronunciation. It is also an excellent reference for language teachers.
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On the surface, at times it does appear that imitation does work when wanting to improve your pronunciation. For the people who have heard something and imitated it successfully, they would be convinced that all you need to do is to imitate to get the pronunciation of a new language. This is a grave mistake
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