This document discusses speaking and pronunciation from a discourse perspective. It addresses key questions about teaching these areas: - Both sentences and texts have value, but a discourse focus helps students notice authentic language use and better prepares them for real communication. - Classroom activities can raise awareness of discourse features like genre, exchange structure, and conversational moves to sensitize students. - A variety of authentic and semi-authentic spoken materials on a continuum from sentences to natural speech can be used based on availability.

1. Speaking and
Pronunciation

2. What are
speaking and
pronunciation?
Language is used to
negotiate and achieve
meaning in social
contexts and so
cannot be divorced
from those contexts.
The perspective takes
us beyond the focus
on the sentence,
which has
traditionally been the
unit of analysis in
much grammatical
analysis and language
teaching. In our
discussion here,
‘sentences’ as formal
grammatical units are
irrelevant; rather, we
are concerned with
spoken ‘utterances’,
which could be
anything from ‘yeah’
to an extended
monologue.
There are different
ways of pronouncing
the individual sounds
which make up the
utterance. All these
elements together
make up the way we
sound to our
interlocutors, and so
are crucial factors in
conveying meaning
when we talk.

3. Speaking and
Pronunciation
The way we sound to our interlocutors is not a trivial or unimportant
matter; it is how we project our identity as individuals and how we
indicate our membership of particular communities as social beings .
At the same time our pronunciation is also responsible for ‘intelligibility
The issue of intelligibility is one that second or foreign language learners
are keenly aware of.
In pronunciation learning and teaching, matters are complicated by the
fact that many of these things normally happen subconsciously and so
are not really accessible to conscious analysis and intervention.
Overall, then, the significance of understanding what makes up
‘pronunciation’ is far-reaching, and a basic knowledge in this area can be
evaluable and powerful resource for language teachers and learners
alike.

4. Issues in
Speaking
Speakers and listeners (‘interlocutors’) are involved simultaneously in
both producing and processing spoken interactions. They are under time
constraints which mean that they must process language as they go,
with no opportunities to go back and make changes.
Speakers must also take account of relationships with others, adjusting
their language according to the meanings they wish to get across, and
responding to verbal or non-verbal signals from their listeners that they
are being understood.
Many spoken interactions consist of commenting on immediate actions
or events, or casually moving from one topic to another. However, it is
also true that some types of speech may:
 More planned in advance (such as meetings)
 Written to be spoken (such as news broadcasts)

5. Issues in
Speaking
Informal spoken language tends to contain many clauses that are
independent of each other, in contrast to written language, which
typically contains more dependent clauses.
‘Formulaic expression’, wordings that commonly go together and are
used as a kind of shorthand in familiar situations.
‘Ellipsis’, the omission of parts of structures that would usually be
expected, also eases the pressure in speaking production.

6. Genres of
Speaking
One way we can think about spoken discourse at a macro-level is to
consider the concept of discourse types, or ‘genres’.
Martin and Rothery (1980–1981) define genre as a ‘staged, goal-
oriented, social process ’, indicating that:
1. A genre evolves within a culture and its social
institutions (hence social)
2. Social processes are purposeful (hence goal-
oriented)
3. It usually takes a number of steps to achieve one’s
purpose (hence staged)

7. Transactional communication
vs
interactional communication
Transactional communication is primarily motivated by an exchange of goods and service, for
example, booking a flight at a travel agent or phoning a careers’ centre for information, whereas
the motivation for interactional communication is primarily to create and maintain social
relationships, for example, casual conversations between friends (see also Dalton and
Seidlhofer, 1994: 9–12, 53). We say ‘primarily’ because in reality talk in daily life is often a
mixture of the two.

8. Generic
Structure
Generic or schematic structure (Martin, 2001) refers to the overall way in
which a text unfolds.
The spider text is a personal ‘narrative’ which typically shows the
structure.
Genres contain both obligatory and optional elements; Abstract and
Coda will not be present in all instances of narrative. However, the
obligatory elements are the key elements and must be present for a text
to be defined and recognized as reflective of a particular genre.

9. The Abstract,
which summarizes
or encapsulates
the main point,
usually signals the
start of a story
This is followed by
the Orientation
The Complication,
the main part of
the narrative,
presents events in
time sequence
which leads up to
a problem or crisis
The Resolution
stage reveals how
the story’s main
players resolve the
crisis
In the concluding
stage of Coda the
story is brought
full circle; Coda
makes a point
about the text as a
whole and
reorients the
speakers to the
present.

10. Exchange
Exchange structure analysis provides a way of showing ‘how speakers
can keep taking turns’.
The ‘classic’ Initiation (I)–Response (R)–Follow-up (F) exchange (Sinclair
and Coulthard, 1975) is illustrated in the following:
A: What the poison goes straight up the arm into their … (Initiation)
B: I don’t know if it was the poison … just like a blowtorch (Response)
A: Aah (Follow-up)
The function of follow-ups is to acknowledge information supplied in
the response, show our social and emotional reactions to the topic and
indicate ‘convergence’ or shared understanding.
Formulaic expressions are common in follow-ups:
A: My God, doesn’t it give you the creeps?
B: Yes, absolutely dreadful
However, in many interactions, follow-ups are delayed by a more
protracted series of responses when, for example, further clarifications
or checks are sought.

11. Turn-taking and turn types
1- One possibility for obtaining a turn is to self-select
2 -Turns can be difficult to get when there is high competition, urgency or disagreement
and speakers must attune to local transition points in the conversation such as pauses, or
signals that turns are ending
3 -Another turn-taking opportunity comes when the current speaker nominates
the next
◦ ‘Adjacency pairs’ are major types of turns occurring together that enable speakers to allocate or give up
turns. Question/answer is one of the most common, although there are many others.

12. Speakers must ensure mutual understanding, selecting appropriate levels of
explicitness (cf. Grice, 1975) and using discourse strategies, such as clarifying,
checking, summarizing and adapting to points made by other speakers.
Repetition (McCarthy, 1998) is another discourse device used to manage topic
negotiation.
Topic Management

13. Issues in
Pronunciation
Pronunciation is a term used to capture all aspects of how we employ
speech sounds for communicating.
Pronunciation does not work in isolation from other factors: in addition
to employing our voice, we also use eye movement, mime and gesture.
‘we speak with our vocal organs, but we converse with our entire
bodies’. Abercrombie (1972: 64)

14. There are certain patterns to how speakers use their voices to structure what they say, thus
providing important signposts for listeners as to how to process what they hear.
A good example is the way we usually say telephone numbers in certain groups, and the
variation in these patterns we can observe in different linguacultures. These patterns are
achieved by chunking utterances into what is called ‘sense or tone groups’ or ‘tone units’, which
indicate what, from the speaker’s point of view, ‘belongs together’. Tone groups are
characterized by ‘pitch movement’ ,that is, the voice going up and down, and sometimes set off
by pauses.
Tone units/chunking

15. In any tone unit, the syllable on which the major pitch movement takes place, or begins, is called
‘tonic syllable’ Analysing someone’s ‘intonation’, or speech melody, thus helps us recognize
how that person uses the prosodic feature of ‘pitch’ (perceptual label for ‘high’/‘low’),
sometimes in combination with slightly increased loudness and vowel length, to foreground
what is important.
Prominence

16. ‘Pitch’ and ‘loudness’ are particularly important for the precise timing of turn-taking,
it always seems to be very clear to both interlocutors when they should speak, when they
should be silent, and when and how (not) to yield the floor to the other person.
Turn-taking

17. Social
meanings and
roles/degrees
of
involvement
Dramatic pitch movement is often a sign of strong emotional
involvement. E.g. God Heavens - doesn’t it give you the CREEPS -
absolutely DREADful
But emotional involvement and attitudinal meaning are notoriously
difficult to generalize in any helpful way, as they are so highly
dependent on context, situation and relationships. This is why
descriptions of ‘intonational meaning’ can hardly go beyond ad hoc
observations (O’Connor and Arnold, 1973).
In contrast, Brazil’s (1997) model of the communicative role of intonation
is a powerful one, as it works with a limited set of possible choices to
capture the state of play in discourse as it is negotiated moment by
moment by the interlocutors. A central concept for Brazil is that of
‘common ground’, ‘what knowledge speakers [think they] share about
the world, about each other’s experiences, attitudes and emotions’
(Brazil, Coulthard and Johns, 1980: 15).

18. Social
meanings and
roles/degrees
of
involvement
According to Brazil (1997), it is this assessment as to what is shared and
what is not that determines the speaker’s choice of tone.
The basic options are: tones ending in a rise (‘fall-rise’ or ‘rise’) for a part
of the message which the speaker regards as part of the existing
common ground, and tones ending in a fall (‘fall’ or ‘rise-fall’) for what
they see as adding to the common ground.
E.g.
// Years ago when I was married //
‘married’ will end in a rise if she assumes that the listener knows about
this, and in a fall if she thinks this is new to him/her.
// We met a great man called Stan //
on the other hand, it is clearly new information, and therefore the
sentence ends in a fall.
The distinction between end-rising and end-falling tones is thus a
distinction between invoking ‘the togetherness aspect of the
conversational relationship’ as opposed to expressing ‘unassimilated
viewpoints’ (Brazil, 1997: Chapter 4).

19. Social
meanings and
roles/degrees
of
involvement
Intonation is the most important means by which interlocutors
negotiate their mutual relationship and indicate how they view the topic
under discussion.
During the interaction, intonation enables participants to constantly
check and establish common ground in order to achieve convergence
and conversational solidarity or, alternatively, to assert conversational
dominance.

20. Stress and
Unstress
Content words: (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.)
tend to be the main carriers of meaning and so often get selected for
prominence.
Function words: (articles, prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions)
mainly serve to indicate grammatical relationships and are usually
unstressed in utterances (except when they carry contrastive stress).

21. Sound
Segments
Speech is a continuous stream without clear-cut borderlines between
individual sounds, and when we speak, rather than producing carefully
enunciated ‘citation forms’ of individual words, we tend to minimize our
articulatory effort by making sounds more like each other
(‘assimilation’), sometimes leaving sounds out altogether (‘elision’) and
sometimes inserting a sound to make for a smoother transition
(‘linking’).
As all foreign language learners know, we find some sounds easy and
others difficult when we study a new language. This is because different
languages select different parts of the sound spectrum (‘vowels and
consonants’) for linguistic use.
During first language acquisition, we come to regard the sounds of our
mother tongue as ‘normal’, thus acquiring a kind of mental ‘filter’ which
predisposes us to regard certain sounds as significant and others as not.

22. Sound
Segments
How exactly speech sounds get produced and received as physiological
and acoustic events is explored in the field of ‘phonetics’.
How they are utilized, how they are organized into a system of sounds
in a particular language is the domain of ‘phonology’.
What is not represented in the phoneme system is the actual phonetic
realization of these distinctive sounds, which are called ‘allophones’.
As in our handwriting, where the actual letters we write vary and are
often quite different from the ‘ideal’ shape, no two realizations of a
phoneme, even by the same person, are ever exactly the same.
In addition, there are individual and dialectal differences between the
‘accents’ of different speakers of the same language, that is, users of the
same phoneme inventory.

23. Questions typically asked about teaching speaking and pronunciation
Implications for Pedagogy

24.  Should speaking activities focus on texts or sentences?
 How can a discourse-based approach be applied in classroom practice?
 Should we use only ‘authentic’ texts?
 What procedures are there specifically for pronunciation teaching?
The Questions

25. Should speaking activities focus on texts or sentences
There may be good reasons for focusing on sentence-level study. Cook (1989: 4ff) lists the following:
 Formal grammatical knowledge and skills that provide the basis for communication can be taught. Proficiency in
specific aspects of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary can be easily diagnosed and assessed.
 ‘Abstract’ sentences are still the best material for language instruction as they isolate the language from the
complexities of a particular context.
 Formal language rules underpin well-formed sentences and need to be understood and recognized.
 The treatment of language as sentences has been successful in language learning in revealing how language works.
 It is more difficult to establish rules and constraints about what is communicatively effective beyond sentence-level.

26. Should speaking activities focus on texts or sentences
In contrast, the following are some of the arguments that have been advanced for a focus on text:
 Communicative competence requires more than producing and understanding sentences.
 Texts, in the form of scripted dialogues, are commonly used in language teaching.
 If dialogues are to be used, they should also introduce learners to some of the features of ‘real-life’ discourse, such as
generic structure, associated grammatical choices and the role of pronunciation in creating meaning.
 Focusing on discourse and text helps students to notice and analyse authentic and appropriate usage of language.
 Discourse-based activities enable students to extend their communicative repertoire and prepare them more
effectively for communication in the target language outside the classroom

27. How can a discourse-based approach be applied in
classroom practice?
Both teachers and students can benefit from an awareness of the discourse features of different texts (see Burns, 2006).
Developing awareness of these features suggests a consciousness-raising approach, rather than implying that students
should follow ‘recipe’ type models in a slavish fashion (Burns and Joyce, 1997).
At a macro-level, students can be sensitized to:
• Functional purpose: identifying whether a text is primarily transactional or interactional.
• Generic structure: highlighting the typical ways that different text types ‘unfold’ in spoken interaction. This may help to
clarify reasons for cross-cultural miscommunication where different expectations may be at play; intercultural differences
in genres can also be compared.
• ‘Gate-keeping’ contexts: identifying situations where speakers may have unequal power relations and how language is
used to confirm or contest these roles.

28. How can a discourse-based approach be applied in
classroom practice?
At a micro-level the following patterns can be explored:
• Exchange structure: showing how speakers position themselves to hold the floor and the strategies they use to do this
(challenges, dispreferred responses, clarification checks, etc.).
• Turn-taking: highlighting what kinds of turns are likely to go together and how speakers can take up or modify different
kinds of turns.
• Conversational moves: enabling learners to practise expressions realizing conversational openings, closings, evaluative
follow-ups, back-channelling and so on.

29. Should we use only ‘authentic’ texts?
• ‘Authentic’ texts may not be always be the most available or feasible, but teachers can potentially offer students a
continuum of spoken text samples from single sentences to scripted dialogues to semi-scripted dialogues to
completely natural speech. We have already commented on the use of single sentences.
• There are also advantages and disadvantages to each of the other options.
• Scripted dialogues constructed specifically for the purposes of language teaching are common in many published
course books. They are valuable for students at lower levels because they often control the vocabulary and
grammatical structures introduced. Usually the dialogue is a vehicle for practising particular patterns that have already
been introduced through word- or sentence-level exercises. However, they may present spoken discourse as
unrealistic and unproblematic and they rarely reflect the grammar, discourse features and idiomatic uses of the
language in natural speech. If used exclusively, they represent a ‘restricted diet’ of speaking and pronunciation
development.

30. Should we use only ‘authentic’ texts?
• Semi-scripted texts are increasing in more recently published materials. They are sometimes based on recordings
where speakers are given a general outline of a dialogue and asked to include features of natural discourse (de Silva
Joyce and Burns, 1999). The resulting dialogue is less fragmented and ‘messy’ than authentic discourse and therefore
lends itself to language teaching with a focus on particular topics, vocabulary, grammar, discourse features and
pronunciation. Although it can be a ‘transition’ to authentic speech, it may suffer from some of the same restrictions
as scripted dialogues.
• Authentic texts can introduce students to a full range of transactional and interpersonal speech, as well as the reality,
unpredictability and complexity of spoken communication. They can highlight language variation and choice rather
than fixed and formal sets of rules. However, authentic texts are highly context-dependent and may assume
substantial cultural and social knowledge (Carter, 1997; Widdowson, 2003: especially Chapters 8 and 9). They may
also be fragmented (hesitations, false starts, overlaps, interruptions, unclear utterances) and include too many
different grammatical and other features for focused language pattern practice in the classroom.

31. What procedures are there specifically for pronunciation
teaching?
The teacher’s decision as to what kind of activities to use in any specific context will, depend on
1- An analysis of learner needs.
2- Variables such as learning purpose, learners’ age and setting
Elicited mechanical production
Manipulation of sound patterns without apparent communicative reason and without offering learners an opportunity for
making motivated choices of sounds, stress patterns, etc.
Ear training for sound contrasts
For instance, reading contrasting sounds or words aloud to a class and asking them to decide what has been uttered. This
can take the form of a bingo-like game.
Sounds for meaning contrasts
Although ‘listen and repeat’ is very drill-like, there are numerous ways in which such exercises can be modified to make
them more meaningful for the learner while retaining a focus on sounds. This can be achieved through more active
involvement on the part of the learner, a clearer specification of purpose and a stronger element of choice. Minimal pairs
(pairs of words distinguished by one phoneme only) This BED is not BAD’

32. What procedures are there specifically for pronunciation
teaching?
Cognitive analysis
Many learners, in particular more mature ones, welcome some overt explanation and analysis. These notions include a
wide range of methodological options, such as:
•‘Talking about it’, for example discussing stereotypic ideas about ‘correct’ and ‘sloppy’ speech for introducing assimilation
and elision as crucial features of connected speech.
•Phonetic training: explanations of how particular sounds are articulated, with the help of videos and head diagrams, and
conscious exploration and analysis by learners about how they themselves articulate L1 and L2 sounds.
Whole brain activities, communication activities and games
These are intended to activate the right brain hemisphere and often involve music, poetry, guided fantasies, relaxation
techniques such as yoga breathing.

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