Brandon Cooper, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

The following is a selected excerpt from the interview. To hear more from Okim Kang and Donald Rubin, please watch the accompanying video.

BC: So, how would this influence the way that we prepare language teachers then? Because they're obviously there on the, or those who prepare teachers for that matter, how might this change the way that we sort of prepare them for what they'll be doing?

DR: Yeah. I'll take the first shot. Listen. Okim, you may have some better ideas than I do, but if our focus is on helping learners to communicate effectively rather than on phonetic accuracy, for example, phonemic accuracy, then we need to teach our pronunciation classes as, essentially, communication classes.

I’ve really taught pronunciation in just two contexts. As Okim mentioned, I worked many years with international teaching assistants and then later on, I had an opportunity to teach a very interesting class at a seminary at a theological school where many non-native speakers came in and were going to become preachers and clergy. So, in working with people who are future members of the professoriate, you know, I always began the pronunciation class by saying “Let's learn what American listeners want out of an instructor and what they want out of an instructor, particularly in the STEM class, is somebody they can identify with as a human being. How do you get them to identify with you as a human being?”

And so we talked about norms of self disclosure and humor. I would have them watch, you know, Seinfeld as an example of oral disclosure or Welcome Back Kotter as an example of good humor disclosure that American students expect to know something about their instructors and want to know something about their instructors as human beings. Not everything, they don't want to know about your recent operation or trouble that you're having in your romantic relationship, but they do want to know that you had some of the same struggles and issues, it was interesting.

I resonated to what Okim just said about ITA’s talking about their issues coping with COVID because that's something we all have in common, we're all coping with COVID.

And for me, as an undergraduate student, learning that my calculus instructor is facing many of the same uncertainties and chafing against the same kinds of restrictions as I am, that opens me up to hear what that person has to say about calculus.

So, in working with international teaching assistants, I say your first lesson in pronunciation class is going to be about self disclosure and how do we humanize ourselves for our students, something that Okim does so beautifully, and when working with the with the people who are here to learn to become preachers, our first lesson in pronunciation class is going to be about how to show somebody that you're listening actively, how do you express agreement, show interest, ask questions. Let's talk about active listening, as the first lesson in Pronunciation 101.

And then, once we establish the communication functions, we can then begin to ask about what kinds of pronunciation features are most likely to help us show that we are interested listeners, or that we are humanized individuals, and much influenced here by our colleague Lucy Pickerings’ work in prosody and recognize that one of the main ways that we communicate our “humaneness” and our interest is through prosody and nonverbal communication as well.

Then, and only then, after we start working on being able to communicate effectively in engaging fashion, we can begin to say, “Well, are there any phonetic features that might confuse your listeners that we can maybe, kind of, tweak a little bit? Tweak this phoneme or tweak that phoneme, but that's really the secondary and tertiary kind of concern, rather than beginning with, you know, bilabial plosives and voice versus voiceless fricatives, that's not what we do in pronunciation class.

In pronunciation class we learn “what does that listener need to feel about us in order to get on the same wavelength with us and what are the tools available to us in order to do that?” That's the essence of pronunciation instruction and what I would teach future teachers of pronunciation is take that highly communicative approach.

BC: So, putting connection [Okim Kang: I totally agree.] connection comes first?

DR: Connection comes first.

OK: Yeah I agree. If I may, I mean I entirely agree with what Don said. A couple of things that I just want to add is that I tell our master students, our future teachers, just like what Don mentioned, this being a receptive, responsive listener, this listener is not even a part of this pronunciation curriculum often.

I mean, today, we talked about this stereotyping and listener expectations, but oftentimes I think teachers spend so much time just talking about learner issues, so I tell them, even at the beginning of the semester, we just set a time, just one day just like we do an orientation. We just set one day just to openly talk about these listener issues and give them an explicit discussion and more like an enlightenment about why this issue is important for us, and why the communication problem is not your fault. A lot of the cases are probably the listeners fault.

So that kind of awareness is going to be very important and we tried it here with our intensive English program students and that really makes a difference. We talk about listeners having to change their perceptions and perspectives. What we also need is our learners need to change their perceptions and perspectives.

To do that is the teacher's responsibility, telling learners what is needed and what is successful communication. So, I think that would be really important, like it's really a teacher's role.

BC: Yeah, yeah. What's at stake in the real world? Certainly, outside of education, there are a lot of context to where this really matters. And I know you two have written about this, some of the things that are at stake in the real world outside of education, so what's at stake here?

OK: Don, you want to start first?

DR: Um yeah and I want to, in addressing the question, I want to bounce off Okim’s statement about disclosing to learners that, you know, as hard as they might work on their pronunciation the success of the interaction depends, at least as much, on the listener and that's part of the ethics of pronunciation instruction is that there are limits.

Our reverse linguistic stereotype, unfortunately, suggests there are limits to how successful a non native speaker can be and that's one of the real world implications that if I am a, you know, a Francophone speaker from Cameroon, my skin is dark. I walk into an interaction with a white banker or investment counselor, or something like that, they're going to hear my speech as highly accented and they may decide that they need to patronize me, or they may decide that I am not a good risk for a loan, or they may decide that they're going to shut me off to their subordinate because I’m not worth their time.

So in the real world, until listeners can actually become more adept and more inclined to actually hearing what people are saying, rather than judging how they're saying it or how they think they're saying it, then I think that in every professional and consumer and learner setting, you can imagine there are real world consequences for being a non native speaker.

Some of which, as Okim has said, you can't control. So, you know, what you can control is the impression, or you can make efforts to control the impression that you give to your listener, and say, you know, something like, “When I lived in Cameroon, my investment counselor there suggested that I work in commodities. How do you feel about commodities?”, and all of a sudden, I am elevating myself in the in the stature, not by being able to speak with a higher level of linguistic “proficiency”, whatever that might mean, but by showing that we have shared interest and shared knowledge, we actually do have points of commonality and points of contact.

So, barring that capacity to be able to show that you're a member of the club in some way. You know, the real world consequences are that there's lots of high ability people, deserving people, who get the short end of the stick simply because they're not native speakers, and so many native listeners can't, or won't, give them a fair hearing.

Find the entire recorded interview, with more content and helpful examples, below.