Resource: Connected Speech with “Happy” by Pharrell Williams

One of the resources I developed for my course on English pronunciation in Iraq last summer was a cloze (fill-in-the-blank) worksheet based on the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams. You can watch the music video from YouTube here:

The area of English pronunciation I was looking to target was connected speech–and specifically reductions. My goal was to aid students in their listening comprehension of reductions in natural speech. Especially for learners of English as a foreign language (or English as a lingua franca, ELF) setting, I believe this to be the more important goal, since ELF speakers typically won’t incorporate as many reductions into their speech as L1 English speakers, without any negative impact on comprehensibility. In any case, popular music is a great resource for training learners in understanding reductions, since songs tend to contain so many examples of these.

With this as a starting point, I could have chosen any number of songs as the basis for a listening task. The reason that I chose “Happy” in particular had to do with the broad appeal that the song has had in a variety of different countries, as evidenced by the proliferation of music video adaptations from across the globe. (See here for a version produced close to where I was teaching at the time, which my students pointed me to with great delight.) In part, I was simply looking for a music video that would be unobjectionable to a more conservative Middle Eastern student audience, and this fit the bill. It is also just a fun, foot-tapping song, which my current students here in Norway have responded to just as enthusiastically as my Iraqi students did. As for linguistic criteria, the song seemed like a good choice because the vocabulary it uses is relatively simple, allowing students to focus on the pronunciation features rather than on vocabulary learning.

To make the worksheet, I identified key words and phrases that evidence reduction. These became the gaps (blank lines) in my version of the song lyrics. I tried in particular to include phrases that might arise in natural conversation as well (e.g. I’m about to, want to, don’t). I also included one targets that, strictly speaking, is not an example of reduction but of connected speech more broadly (go to, with a flapped [D] in place of /t/), but the main focus is on reductions of words or phrases.

The activity has been well received by the students I have tried it with so far in Iraq and Norway. It has lent itself to discussion of the relative importance of understanding English reductions vs. using them in one’s own speech, characteristics of various spoken varieties of English (for example, dialect features evident in Pharrell’s pronunciation, such as “prolly” for probably), and sounds that arise as a result of reduction (e.g. glottal stop in can’t nothing), among other things.

You can download my worksheet here: Happy Cloze. I have not included a key, but you can find the full lyrics to the song on many websites, such as this one. Let me know how it goes if you try it with your students–or if you discover a mistake I should fix. Thanks!

Video: Using music excerpts to illustrate connected speech

Introductory note: I am now back in the United States, but I am continuing to write a few blog posts reflecting on my experience teaching English pronunciation to Iraqi schoolteachers this summer. My thoughts are still with these strong and resilient teachers, as many of their hometowns continue to be featured on the news for turmoil and armed conflict.

Screen shot of video from http://www.luizotaviobarros.com

As I was preparing for a lesson on connected speech, I came across one of the best pronunciation teaching videos that I have found online. The video, by Luiz Otávio, consists of a series of five short clips from pop music videos, each one lasting for 30 seconds or less, with features of connected speech highlighted for each one. The video itself is hosted here, and you can also read the creator’s introduction to the video on his blog here.

There are several features that make this video excellent for classroom use:

1. It is efficient. The clips focus in on features of connected speech present in various songs, without taking up time with extended song lyrics that do not relate directly to the teaching point.
2. It is repetitive—in a good way. Because each song clip is played several times, students have several opportunities to notice phenomena, and they receive reinforcement. I especially like that the last repetition of each song clip is slowed down, which makes it easier to hear the linking.
3. It is inductive. Students hear the song clips before being told what points they illustrate. Information is also added gradually as the clip is repeated.
4. It adds value. Most pronunciation videos, at least on YouTube, feature and instructor telling viewers about a language point, followed by some examples. This may be interesting enough for an independent learner at home, but it adds little to a classroom environment. By contrast, Luiz Otávio’s video consists almost entirely of authentic listening samples, with or without commentary. This content cannot otherwise be replicated by the teacher, unlike a taped lecture.

One teaching tip I would add for using the video well is to pause it when each set of song lyrics first appear to highlight which segments they should focus on. In this way, students engage with a specific listening goal and have the opportunity to compare their predictions to authentic materials.

Screen shot of video from http://www.luizotaviobarros.com

My one critique of the video content is a repeated instruction not to pronounce the terminal ‘e’ in most English words before linking to the next word, as in ‘come on’ [kəm´ɒ:n]. While technically correct, this comment about final ‘e’ is a digression into phonics instruction that I find unhelpful. Because most students are accustomed to describing words in terms of letters rather than sounds, they generally are unaware of the number of consonant and vowel sounds in English, which I have experienced as a significant hurdle in getting students to differentiate among the 15-20 vowel sounds present in any given variety of English (thus, the need for tools such as the Color Vowel Chart to help with awareness raising). To keep the focus on pronunciation–as opposed to phonics–throughout the video, I would suggest that the teaching point for phrases such as the one above is that a final consonant links to the start of a following vowel-initial word inside the same thought group, with a reminder that spelling does not always tell us the final sound (or initial sound, e.g. ‘herb’ [ʔɜrb] in American English).

In any case, it is a great resource. Ever since I found this video, I have been thinking about what other song clips I could use to illustrate different aspects of pronunciation. This idea of using only small selections from songs to illustrate a single feature greatly widens the number of potential candidates, since most songs accurately illustrate some aspect of English pronunciation at some point, even if they don’t do so throughout (e.g. ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna: generally bad for sentence-level stress and intonation, but good in places, such as “If the hand is hard, together we’ll mend your heart”).

What are your favorite videos for teaching English pronunciation?

Instructional materials on a shoestring

Students captivated by a movie of themselves, eltpics

Having spent the great majority of my teaching career working for resource-poor institutions, I have well-developed skills for finding instructional materials online. In fact, I have finally gotten around to bookmarking as many as I have a meaningful record of at my Diigo profile, though the tedious task of streamlining my tags remains. Using Diigo has already made it much easier to find materials I have used for courses in the past, but putting together a whole course’s worth of free materials is still extremely time-consuming.

That is why is was so excited when I came across the UK ESOL Core Curriculum while doing curriculum research for the adult English program I currently oversee (thanks to Beverley Timgren). What is so extraordinary about this resource, you might ask? In addition to a comprehensive curriculum outline for five levels of instruction (corresponding roughly to CEFR levels up to B2), all of this is available to download legally for absolutely free:

• Student books at 5 different levels (e.g. Level 1)
• Teacher guides for the student books (e.g. scroll down for Level 1)
• Audio tracks to accompany the student books
• Diagnostic tests, including audio
• Proficiency tests, including audio (scroll down to ‘initial assessment’)
• Teacher orientation materials
• Teacher training modules
• Student exemplars to use for teacher training

That’s basically everything that my program currently buys from a bookstore, plus tests and teacher training materials, which other teachers and I have been creating up until this point! The website is a bit clunky to navigate, though, so you can thank me for those nicely arranged links later.

Now, of course I need to look into the cost of printing student books before I conclude that these materials are going to save my program and my students a boatload of money. And there is some material that is less relevant to my students, since they are learning in an EFL rather than an ESL setting. But still! If I were back at the low-budget, high-ambition ESOL programs for adult immigrants in the United States where I used to work, I would be thanking my lucky stars and making plans for what to do with all that time saved on searching for free materials. As it is, I am working on downloading all of the materials to adapt where useful for my current students and to keep on file for the next time I have a group of eager students and no budget to speak of.

So, thanks to the UK government for investing in adult basic education and sharing the resources with us all.