These three videos may help provide a way into Scott Thornbury's article "Having a good jaw: voice-setting phonology". The first features an American man making up streams of language which he thinks sound like Chinese, French, Italian, and so on. Note that he doesn't speak any of the languages he imitates, so what he produces are simply what he believes are the SOUNDS of each language:
Would you be able to guess which languages he is impersonating without the subtitles? Does his brand of Fake Chinese sound in any way like real Chinese, for example? At the beginning of the clip he invites people from around the world to submit clips of themselves speaking "Fake English", and if you search for this term on Youtube you'll find lots of clips of people trying to do exactly that. One variation on the theme is this clip of a couple speaking Fake American English. The idea here is to show English-speakers what some dialogue in American movies can sound like to people who don't understand English:
If we wrote a script for this dialogue, it wouldn't make almost no sense, but to my simple British ear, they sound like an American couple. So how does this relate to Scott Thornbury's article?
Thornbury's starting point is the observation that although a "top-down" approach has been adopted in many areas of English language teaching, the attention given to pronunciation remains (or remained, since he wrote the article way back in 1993) very much "bottom-up", with attention to the sound and production of individual phonemes and lots of activities featuring minimal pairs. His argument, then, is that a more top-down approach to pronunciation is needed, and that this can be achieved through attention to a wider view that takes in all elements of speech production at the same time. Within this view, the position of a speaker's jaw, and associated facial expressions come into play. Go back to the first clip above and notice how the man's face changes as he switches between languages. Does this have an effect on the sounds he produces? Think about someone you know who speaks a second language very well. Do they look in any way different when they're speaking that language compared to when they speak their first language? What do you think?
I promised three video clips, and I can't resist including this last one. This is an interview from Dutch TV in which the new manager of FC Twente discusses his team's forthcoming Champions League Matches. Do you notice anything strange about the way he speaks?
The man speaking is Steve McClaren, once labelled "the wally with the brolly" after the end of a short and humiliating career as England manager. At the time of the interview, he had just moved to Holland to manage a Dutch team, and had just started learning Dutch. It was his first job after his failure with the English national team and he was still a figure of fun for the British media, so when people saw this video they found it hilarious. For some reason, he is trying to speak English with a Dutch accent. At times he reverts back to his "normal" way of speaking, but the Dutch accent keeps coming back in. He even says "what you call underdogs" to the interviewer as if SHE is the English-speaker and he is speaking Dutch.
This clip is quite famous among football fans, and I personally find it very amusing. I laugh every time I see it. But perhaps Steve McClaren knows about voice-setting phonology and this was simply his strategy as a language learner. Perhaps by imitating the Dutch accent when he spoke English, he was simply employing good language learning techniques. What do you think?
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