March 2018
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TEACHING THE VOWEL SPACE WITH THE METAPHOR OF THE VOWEL ELEVATOR
Nancy C. Elliott, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon, USA

The vowel space is not an easy concept for learners to understand and visualize; it can be equally challenging for preservice teachers and those new to the study of phonetics. Consonantal parameters, such as voicing, place and manner of articulation, and aspiration may seem more straightforward to explain and demonstrate—one can see the teeth and lips, feel the vocal folds vibrating, detect the explosion of air—but the production of vowels is a mostly invisible phenomenon, with articulatory descriptions more mysterious-seeming than “touch the back of your tongue to the back of the roof of your mouth.” To reassure students, the authors of one introductory linguistics textbook (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, 2003) write, “You may not understand at first what we mean by ‘front,’ ‘back,’ ‘high,’ and ‘low’ vowels, but we encourage you to persist. It will come” (p. 252). The metaphor of the Vowel Elevator can be used as a teaching aid for helping new teachers and learners to gain this understanding.

How the Metaphor Works

Working with students, I describe the mouth as a multifloor building, and the tongue as a series of elevators that move from floor to floor. Different languages have different numbers of stories: the English building has five stories (with rather low ceilings); the Spanish and Japanese buildings have three stories; and the Arabic building has two very tall, spacious stories. The English building has a front elevator, a back elevator, and a central express elevator that goes directly to the very popular schwa area on the middle floor.

Taking Students for a Ride on the Elevators

To introduce students to the vowel space and to practice moving around in it accurately, I use slides containing visually helpful images (e.g., a five-story house; a building with three elevators, up and down elevator buttons). I have students use hand gestures while making the vowel sounds as we “go” up and down the elevator, in order to make full use of multisensory channels (vision, kinesthesia, touch, sound). This use of several senses at once strengthens the formation of memories and enhances learning (Shams & Seitz, 2008). Students first “ride” the front elevator from the bottom floor to the top floor and back down; in this way they experience the ending points and the full spectrum of the continuum from /iy/ to /æ/. Then we go for another ride, but stop at particular floors to locate the other vowel phonemes on the continuum. Later, students will ride the back elevator in a similar fashion. They are encouraged to move their hand in the direction of the elevator as we go. I point out to students that in most dialects, the English elevators bounce a little on the third floor; students should give their hand movement a bounce when they say the third-floor vowels /ey/ and /ow/. In addition, I advise students that in many American dialects, native speakers taking the back elevator simply skip the second floor and go to the first floor instead (to represent the so-called caught-cot merger).

Some Activities

For English language learners, the target area they must hit for each vowel phoneme is quite limited, so Vowel Elevator activities can help them fine-tune their production and comprehension. After students have explored the language building from top to bottom and points between, they will practice traveling from one floor to another and back; for example, from the fifth floor /iy/ to the fourth floor / I / for the contrast leave-live, or from the fourth floor to the second floor for the contrast lift-left. (Slides with images of an elevator arriving at the appropriate floor are accompanied by student hand gestures and articulation.)

One activity for pairs or small groups is the game “Guess Which Floor I’m On,” in which students try to identify the floor number of a word spoken by their partner, from a small selection of minimal pairs. To work on the distinction of front-central-back vowels in words such as lack-luck-lock, students do a similar activity, “Guess Which Elevator I’m Taking,” in which students identify the vowel sound as being on the front, central, or back elevator. Although it would serve the same purpose to have students identify a vowel by a number or phonetic symbol, keeping the terminology in the scheme of the Vowel Elevator is an effective part of the usefulness of the metaphor.

Final Thoughts

Metaphors are useful tools in helping to visualize the invisible or explain the unfamiliar, and the Vowel Elevator metaphor provides that support, not just for comprehending the vowel space, but also for practicing the vowel sounds of English in particular, with its five vowel heights squeezed into one relatively small oral cavity. For teachers already using the Color Vowel® approach—associating vowel sounds with assonant words for particular colors (Taylor & Thompson, 2015)—the Vowel Elevator metaphor can be blended right in, if, for example, the top floor is labeled the floor where you find green tea and a blue moon, the ground floor is for black cats and olive socks, and so on. Finally, supporting the visual and aural with the kinesthetic provides a multichannel learning experience as students practice “traveling” around the vowel space, using hand movements while viewing images and producing sounds.

References

Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2003). An introduction to language. Boston, MA: Thomas and Heinle.

Shams, L., & Seitz, A. (2008). Benefits of multisensory learning. Trends in Cognitive Science, 12, 411–417.

Taylor, K., & Thompson, S. (2015). The Color Vowel Chart. Santa Fe, NM: English Language Training Solutions.


Nancy C. Elliott has a PhD in linguistics from Indiana University and teaches at the University of Oregon’s American English Institute. Her research interests are in English sociophonetics, rhoticity, and judgments of comprehensibility.

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