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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. |