Phonetics vs. Phonemics in the ESL Classroom: When Is Allophonic Accuracy Important?

Abstract

The question posed in the title is examined as a part of the larger problem of establishing a hierarchy of priorities for the teaching of pronunciation. Current distinctive-feature analysis of English phonology suggests that teachers should pay more attention than they have been paying to help their students internalize the relationships between spelling and sound, stress and vowel quality, and roots and derivations. The structuralist concept of the phoneme is still very useful since it provides a guideline for judging the relative importance of pronunciation difficulties caused by the interference of the students' mother tongue. Though the phonemic-phonetic distinction leads us to attach more importance to phonemes than to allophones, we do not yet have enough experimental data to permit neglecting the latter entirely. Much more information is needed regarding the value of such features as aspiration and vowel length as clues to the recognition of words. Until it is available, teachers would do well to suspect that any departure from the phonetic norms of the language can have a negative effect on the intelligibility of speech. 1. Explanation of Terminology