Mind your pronunciation

Pronunciation should be smoothly understood by natives and non-natives alike. It is more important to take care of pronunciation than just mimicking the accentSpeech is one of the most unique and divine gifts that Almighty Allah has blessed man with. It differentiates a human being from creatures in the whole cosmos. Speech is the real index to a human being's mind and soul. Words spoken gently have a softening impact on the listener, compelling him to listen till the last sound is uttered. It is for this reason that a lot of stress has always been put on the better way of pronunciation, be it any language.In the Holy Quran, Allah advises the Prophet:"And recite the Quran with Tarteel (in a slow, pleasant tone and style)." (73:4). Obviously as 'the language of kings is the king of languages', the Almighty has ordered the believers to recite the Holy Quran with 'Tarteel' that is by adhering to the rules of pronunciation in order to convey accurate meaning and purpose and to create a softening and long lasting effect on the hearts of listeners. Modern philosophers also seal their appreciation and loud admiration for the eternal veracity on speech by the Holy Quran. Lylie Pragnell in his article "The Philosophy of Speech" published in "The Philosopher" (Volume V, 1928) quotes Montaigne and writes:"There is nothing in our composition either purely immaterial or purely spiritual," says Montaigne, and perhaps of all things this can be most truly said of the duality of the human voice. "It is a self-conscious entity whose powers are so great as to be almost illimitable when governed by the wise ones."And English is no exception: it is no more just a post-colonial upshot. In spite of the tug of war between regional and international languages, especially in China, English is still emphatically attached to success in jobs, businesses and learning modern subjects, be it Theology, Astronomy or Science. And better English communication skills undoubtedly call for paying heed to pronunciation in teaching and learning as the fundamental step towards effective and successful communication.Striking a balance:Spoken as EFL (English as First Language) and ESL (English as Second Language), it is part of multicultural and multilingual societies like Pakistan, India and Bangladesh where regional languages are numerous. This calls for a pronunciation of English that is neither too native nor too localised or laden with mother tongue interference. Where "Good" or "Bad" communication is a job's first priority, there is an utmost urge, especially among the educated masses, to improve pronunciation. Sadly, "Good pronunciation" is a tag attached to and understood to be the native-like accent and pronunciation: a misapprehension caused by the obvious effect of the elite class.Comfortable intelligibilityAspirant individuals strive to break the shackles of their mother tongue's interference in English in order to impersonate the Native American or British accent, ending up with a mock pronunciation and an inarticulate variety of the English language. Given the medley of languages and inborn mother tongue interferences, the pursuit of native-like English is a far-fetched and quite unrealistic goal.If one wishes to set realistic and realisable goals for pronunciation, it is unquestionably "Comfortable intelligibility" in pronunciation and in accent, which aims at something close enough to the correct. What matters is "Counts of sameness identified by the listener". Intelligibility is then "Being understood at a given time in a given situation" and in this sense synonymous to "Understandability". Simply, the more words a listener is able to identify accurately, the more intelligible the speaker is. Besides, trying to speak in the native-like accent without any consideration of the non-native people around us may run the risk of desperate breakdowns in communication.Stress, syllables and timing:Local languages like Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto, or Chinese and French are altogether different from English. The former are spoken in a syllabic-timed language, in which every syllable takes-up roughly the same amount of time when pronounced and the latter being stressed-timed ie only selective syllables take-up more time than the others, thus creating a different rhythm. Syllabic-timed English can definitely be "Comfortably intelligible" and easier for locals. But the truth remains: Syllabic-timed English pronunciation is not standard and the stressed- timed pronunciation is the ambition of many individuals because of the prestige attached to it.Learning Strategies:Pronunciation should be smoothly understood by native and non-native people alike. In other words, it is more appreciable to take care of pronunciation than just mimicking the accent. But that does not mean that wrong pronunciation should be overlooked simply because it is understood. The preferable strategy, then, is to identify and discover where the differences between the 'Standard English' pronunciation and the 'Local English' pronunciation are unavoidably huge. These areas will vary according to the learners and their mother tongue interferences. It is appreciable to address these problems of pronunciation with the goal of comfortable intelligibility in mind.This leads to the identification of areas: Not all the areas of pronunciation are worthy to be addressed in local context. The suitable approach is to leave off the gratuitous areas before adopting any teaching methodology. It is a common observation that rhotic and non-rhotic distinction is problematic even in students who learn pronunciation quite easily and given that it does not hinder intelligibility it should not come in the teaching of pronunciation. Similarly, the question of the intrusive /r/ sound between two vowel sounds at the word boundary when the "R" is actually not there can be ignored. Also, the two different shades of /l/ sound have simply no relevance in non-native English pronunciation scenario in Pakistan. The more complicated rules of connected speech, like assimilation and omitting certain sounds are less relevant because this tendency is least in Pakistani non-native speakers. The point is that the students can learn pronunciation even without them, with ease and economy.
Common mistakes
All the same, highly problematic habits in pronunciation need to be identified and are worthy to be taught. For example, the pronunciation of individual sounds often inhibits intelligibility and there are certain words which are best understood when pronounced in a non-native way, for example, many people pronounce "Therapy" as "Thraapi", "Nomenclature" as "Nomun-clature" (With double stress) "Modern" as "Modrun" and "Market" as "Markeet". That does not mean that such pronunciations need not to be corrected towards improvement, most of the time mispronounced words do hamper the meaning altogether. The fact is, such pronunciation mistakes are not random: They are regular and systematic. For example, EFL and even ESL students in our country jumble up the long vowel sound of "Saw" and the short vowel sound of "Spot" and "Turn" and "Ton", and it is the task quite laborious for the students to utter correctly the difference between "Bad", "Bed" and "Bade". Also, the distinction between different stress patterns is important to teach in order to grasp the complete meaning. For example, CONtent and conTENT as noun and verb, respectively.Another jumble up is the inability to discriminate between "emPLOY" and imployEE, as these are pronounced the same way. Interestingly, "Scold" and "Is called" are mixed-up because of insertion of /i / of "Lip" before /s/ sound, a mistake found almost naturally among people here and is part of Indian-Pakistani English dialect.Stress and Rhythm:Thus, it is important to eradicate and "Correct" bad pronunciation habits at any stage of a learner's career. Since, communication and pronunciation go together and can never be separated and comfortable intelligibility must be pursued with a keen eye on the learner's habitual errors. It is essential to continuously observe the mother tongue interference in the English of a non-native speaker. Conversely, it is a sorry state that the most important areas of pronunciation namely 'Stress'- both word and sentence, and 'Rhythm' are altogether ignored in teaching of English. This disables learners to comprehend native English and thus is the biggest hindrance in learning English because without proper listening, it is natural not to expect a learner to improve his language skills as "Language starts with the ear". It may sound too technical but one cannot overlook the fact that stress and rhythm complement grammar and meaning simultaneously, or one is prone to mix-up "Come for table" and "Comfortable". Secondly, vowel quantity is of high importance as in Urdu. Because, what if one mixes-up words like "Turn" and "Ton"! And it happens so often. Thirdly, contrastive stress is an area, which must be taken care of in Pakistani setting or the whole lot of information is missed out very easily. Once this level of intelligibility is attained, the teacher may go on to cultivate improved areas like assimilation, elision and the less common tones of English language.Pronunciation has been rightly called the 'Cinderella' of English language. But it is true with almost all the languages of the world where considerations of how the breath should shape up in mouth to form the speech sounds is given the least importance. Almost always, so much importance is given to the grammatical elements and rules that learners do not contract the grammatical words like auxiliary and conjunction. Learners need to be taught the difference between spoken and written language, the former having no concept of "Word" as such. All we speak is the strings of sounds that are supple, smooth and soft if pronounced properly and intelligibly.It is suggested that one should start with supra segmental features or prosody of the language in question. Because once "rhythm" and "stress" are prioritised, it will facilitate to grasp new information, help in discourse and will serve syntactical and lexical purpose then it matters just a little then if a person says "Iskool" or "Skool": It will autocorrect.