What teachers need to know about phonetics (part 2)

I love linguistics, particularly phonetics and phonology. As an MFL teacher, this has been an asset for me and really helped me and my department to teach phonics well. In part 1 of this series about how linguistics knowledge can help teachers, I talked about some key phonics terminology and how linguists think about consonants. 

I think vowels can be much more difficult than consonants to describe, and for our students to get right, particularly in French. However, they are still very important, and very interesting... 

Unlike consonants, vowels are all made without an obstruction of airflow, so it is harder to form distinct categories. When talking about vowels, linguists consider the mouth as a trapezium, calling this the ‘vowel space’.   

The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a system of phonetic notation in which every possible distinct sound (phoneme) has one consistent symbol to represent it. The IPA depiction of the vowel space is below: 

The upper, wider part of the trapezium is the top of your mouth, and the significantly narrower bottom of the trapezium the bottom of your mouth; the left side of the diagram is at the front of your mouth. You can actually feel the ‘edges’ of your vowel space by saying ee (as in bee, represented by /i/ in the diagram), ah (like you’re at the dentist(!), represented by /a/), and oo (as in goose, represented by /u/). The symbol /ə/ is at the centre of the vowel space, made when your mouth is relaxed. The sound is called a schwa, and it’s found often in English, for example at the end of ‘sofa’ or ‘comma’.  

However, the IPA shows all the vowels it is humanly possible to make, and each language uses only some of them. Each language only uses a subset of the vowel sounds above. Despite having only 5 vowel letters in the alphabet, English has 20+ vowel sounds depending on the accent. There are several vowels that exist in French but not in English, and even those in common may be spelled with different graphemes (see part 1 for more details). 

In addition, with vowels there is no restriction of airflow, and no articulators touching in the mouth like with consonants (ie. the tongue touching the aveolar ridge – see part 1 for more details). This means that there is a lot more room to move around, so there is flexibility with exactly where the vowel sounds are produced from person to person. This is particularly obvious in the case of regional accents, but there is variation in the production of vowels even by the same person. 

The different variations of a phoneme are called allophones. Depending on your accent or the context of a word, we may produce an allophone, but this doesn’t affect the meaning and native speakers generally don’t even notice that the sound used in each context is different. For example, the form of the ‘t’ sound produced in ‘top’ and ‘stop’ are in fact different sounds; the two ‘t’ sounds are allophones of the same phoneme.  

There is significant variation in the vowel phoneme used in words like ‘but’: the Cambridge Dictionary lists two allophones, /bʌt/ and /bət/, depending on the context within a sentence. In fact, British realisations of /bʌt/ tend to be slightly further forward in the mouth (towards /ɐ/ on the IPA vowel diagram above) than American accents. However, many Northern English accents don’t use the sound /ʌ/ at all, and typically produce this higher in the vowel space, as /bʊt/; other areas produce this as /bɐt/. These are all vowel variations produced in the back of the mouth, but none in the exact same part of the vowel space. 

The flexibility of vowels means it can be a real challenge to make sure our students are accurately producing the phonemes of the target language. I don’t feel it’s a realistic expectation that students produce sounds in the target language exactly as a native speaker would, especially as native speakers could subconsciously pronounce the sounds differently themselves, and two native speakers from different regions could pronounce the sounds quite differently from each other. Therefore, our aim for teaching phonics should be to give students the target ‘zone’ in which to say the vowel sound; they may sound like they have an English accent, but they will still be clearly understandable. 

This is something I don’t think the phonics lists published by the exam boards for the new GCSE have been clear enough about. This could potentially lead to a lack of consistency in marking, unless there are sound files or use of IPA symbols to list what would be an acceptable rendering of the sounds. 

Tips for teaching vowel sounds

When teaching vowels, lots and lots of listening is once again very important! We can also use students’ knowledge of English to help them identify the target ‘zone’ in the vowel space. By this, I mean identifying what is the closest English vowel phoneme to the target language one. For example, the French word ‘sœur’ (sister) has the phonemes /sœʁ/ (discussion of teaching French ‘r’ in part 1). However, /œ/ is not a phoneme used in English, so if we consider where French people actually produce this sound in the vowel space, it is quite close to the sound /ɜ/, as in the English word ‘nurse’, so linking these together may help students to remember the sound more accurately (be careful though, as in some areas, including where I teach, your students may pronounce this very differently). 

The French sound ‘é', ie. ‘allé', 'école' etc, is pronounced with the sound /e/. This exists in English, but it is often also produced as /eɪ/, such as in the word ‘face’ or ‘yay’. Telling our students that ‘é’ sounds like ‘yay’ may not be technically exactly accurate, but it does help students to remember the target ‘zone’ within the vowel space, and helps them to be clearly understandable, albeit with an English accent. The more listening practice they have, the more accurate this sounds. 

We can also use a scientific explanation to help our students. For example, the French sound /y/, as in ‘tu’, can be very challenging for English students to master; they tend to hear it as /u/ (as in goose) and struggle to pronounce it differently. I typically explain that it is like the sound /i/ (as in bee), but you need to round your lips while saying it. Try it – you may feel a little silly, but it does work! 

A solid grasp of phonetics is an asset when teaching phonics; we can make the abstract concrete for our students, and we can have a clearer picture of how to help them become clearly understandable, in a realistic, achievable way.