Phonological Variability in Pronunciation Instruction: A Principled Approach

Abstract

Variability is in the nature of an ever-changing language. The language teacher cannot responsibly dodge variability but must arrive at a realistic strategy for coping with it. Such a strategy is outlined here. Its realism is derived from an understanding of sound change in language and of the language-level (as opposed to dialect-level) goal of the student. Sound change has affected the phonemic inventory, the phonemic word classes, and the phonetic composition of phonemes in every dialect. The teaching strategy developed here achnowledges such sound changes and uses this information to promote the student's language-level goal. This is accomplished by avoiding the dialectal dogmatism which arises out of the phonemic approach to teaching. In place of the phoneme is the language-level concept of contrast unit. In the contrast approach to pronunciation, the teacher eliminates from instructional materials all instances of variability in phonemic inventory and phonemic word classes, that is, all phonological variability. But the teacher does nothing to eliminate or modify his or her allophonic repertoire, or phonetic variability, although tolerance in accepting known variants is encouraged.