Parrot Proper Pronunciation

by Kit Lum

HAVE you ever spoken to a stranger on the phone and wondered what language she was speaking? Just the other day, I received what would have been a simple phone call with a perfectly straightforward message – your daughter is unwell and she would like to go home. Could you please come pick her up?

But as it turned out, I had no idea what the caller was saying. It sounded vaguely like English but I couldn’t be sure.

Is speaking an important language skill? No doubt about it – it’s the very means to making yourself understood. But speaking is also the skill that is frequently overlooked because we have come to take it so much for granted. By virtue of the fact that we can almost all speak, we assume we can necessarily make ourselves understood. My caller was speaking, but she wasn’t making herself understood.

Which brings us to the question: What is the correlation between speaking and being understood? The key is pronunciation. You have a much better chance of being understood if your pronunciation is clear and accurate. Unfortunately, with the English language having taken a back seat over the last few decades in this country, mispronunciations have not only gone uncorrected, they are being passed on from one generation to the next.

Take the word “market” for instance – a common everyday word we use and hear all the time. One of my primary school students read it as “mar-cat” in a comprehension passage we were doing. When I pointed out his mistake, he was quick to defend himself by saying, “But everyone pronounces it like that” – which incidentally, was the same response I got when I pointed this out to my adult students. “That may be so,” I tell them, “but that doesn’t make it right.”

It’s easy to see what has led our pronunciation down this decadent path. Speaking is the medium through which we most commonly learn a language. Parents speak. Teachers speak. When people speak, children listen and they absorb every word, like little sponges. The next thing you know, they’re ‘parrot’-ing everything they hear, exactly as they heard it.

This can be good or bad. It can either work for or against you, depending on which version you’re exposed to – the accurate pronunciation, or the one that’s mispronounced. Sadly, learners of English are not the only ones guilty of mispronunciations. Many from English-speaking homes have been exposed to mispronunciations from an early age.

So can decades of mispronunciations be corrected? You bet. But it won’t be easy. It’s going to take a lot of conscious self-correction and determination, but yes, it can be done. As a matter of fact, it should be done – for the sake of our children and our grandchildren. Well, let’s see if we can’t find some good places to start:

1. Years ago, you invested in a dictionary. You can’t remember when … it’s been so-o-o long? Never mind. Just get it off the shelf, dust it off, and let’s start putting it to good use. Use it for verifying your pronunciation of new or doubtful words, even those words you use every day but have come to take for granted – like “basket”, “cashier”, “restaurant”, “tuition” and “photographer”. Don’t take someone else’s word for it (pun intended); check it out for yourself.

One important thing to remember about English pronunciation is that unlike many other languages, English is a stressed language. This means that not every syllable in a word receives equal importance or stress. Often, common words are mispronounced as a result of a misplaced stress and can end up sounding quite different from what it should be.

2. When you watch an English language movie, consciously listen out for the native speaker’s pronunciation and pay special attention to the stress. There’s your teacher right there on screen. Hear a familiar word that you (and everyone else) pronounce differently, remember it, verify it and then use it. Who cares if nine thousand nine hundred other people are still saying “mar-cat”? At least you’re one step ahead of them.

3. Practise, practise, practise! Language teachers can’t say this often enough. Even if you’re attending an English course, don’t expect your pronunciation to improve overnight if you don’t practise.

If you already speak the language, make a conscious effort to catch your own mispronunciations and correct them. If you are a parent, correct your children too, so that the mispronunciations can be stopped here and now.

29 August 2002

See the actual article as it appears in thestar.com.my

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About the author:

Kit Lum is an experienced and certified English teacher who teaches adults and children, and conducts corporate courses in Business English. Visit her website at http://englishone.go-getglobal.com. Use the contact form on the site to contact her for details about her classes.

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