Speechcraft: Workbook for International TA Discourse

Evidence in favor of a strategy-based model for English pronunciation instruction

“…Learner-friendly pedagogical rules are those that do not assume any prior knowledge of the English sound system. For example, learners can be taught the following four orthographic rules to guide their predictions of which sounds to link (or combine) within words and at word boundaries without changing their phonetic qualities (Dickerson, 2015; Hahn & Dickerson, 1999a; Sardegna, 2011): C-V (including /y/ and /w/) Linking: e.g., give in (you will hear ‘givin’). When the first word ends in a consonant (C) sound and the second word starts with a vowel (V) sound, the C sound attaches itself to the V sound. C-sameC Linking: e.g., full load (you will hear ‘fuload’). The sound of the final consonant in the first word continues as the second word is pronounced. V-V Linking: e.g., go out (you will hear ‘gowout’). All word-final vowels (except for word-final schwa) link to word-initial vowels using their off-glides (/w/ or /y/) as a bridge. This also happens within words: e.g., tuition . Cstop-to-Cstop/nasal/affricate Linking: e.g., hard test, adept . When a stop is adjacent to another stop (/p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/, /g/), nasal (/m/, /n/) or affricate (/ʧ/, /ʤ/) sound (both across and within words), the air between the two consonants is not released. Meaningful phrases are determined by chunking speech into grammatically and syntactically appropriate units (often called ‘thought groups’; see Murphy, 2017).…”

“…There are also learner-friendly pedagogical rules that can assist students in predicting the stress of words and phrases. For example, the Key Stress Rule – a word stress rule proposed by Hahn and Dickerson (1999a) – directs learners to identify and stress the syllable before a key rule ending (key rule endings are -ia, -io, -iu, -ienC [consonant], as in media, radio , obedient ) and then figure out the sound of the stressed syllable following orthography-based vowel quality patterns. Similarly, phrase stress rules, such as new versus old information and contrastive stress, can help learners determine which word(s) should be the most prominent in a phrase – that is, carry primary stress – in order to express the speaker's communicative intent.…”

“…Similarly, phrase stress rules, such as new versus old information and contrastive stress, can help learners determine which word(s) should be the most prominent in a phrase – that is, carry primary stress – in order to express the speaker's communicative intent. Hahn and Dickerson (1999a, 1999b) offer a comprehensive coverage of learner-friendly rules guiding the pronunciation of sounds, words, and phrases in isolation or in discourse – for example, in questions, lists and series, compare and contrast phrases, parentheticals, and so forth (see also Dickerson, 1990, 1994, 2015). (For classroom activities using pedagogical rules, see Sardegna et al (2016) and Sardegna and McGregor (2017).…”

Communicating Off-Record Politeness by Use of Non-Usual Stress in Kiswahili Language

“…By so doing, it evokes a set of possible referents and then uses pitch and length to select one referent from the group. Unusual stress is therefore a special use of prominence that is not restricted by the patterns related to normal prominence such as prominence on the last content word or by the patterns related to information structure, that is, prominence on the last content word of new information (Hahn & Dickerson, 1999). Contrastive prominence can occur Licensed Under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC) anywhere within an utterance, and on any word or part of a word, even if that word or syllable is typically unstressed.…”

International teaching assistants at universities: A research agenda

“…English speakers also use tone choices (rising, level, or falling intonation contours) to express what the speaker believes is new or known information (which teachers need to do), and to express engagement and authority (which teachers also need to do). A textbook for ITAs based on this descriptive framework was published (Gorsuch et al 2013), and other books on pronunciation and academic discourse for advanced-level learners, have appeared (e.g., Hahn & Dickerson 1999). Interestingly, even the availability of principled, pedagogical presentations of suprasegmental aspects of pronunciation has failed to result in suprasegmentals becoming anything like an organizing force in ITA program curricula (Hahn 2004; Gorsuch 2012a).…”