Panel Discussion: Teaching Pronunciation as a Nonnative Speaker of English
July 30, 2010
2:05 introduction of panelists
4:35
Marla: First, they (the TEFL students) want to know something about your own experiences: How old were you when you arrived in the United States? How long did you study English before coming here? How did you learn and improve your English? If you could each tell us basically your English learning story.
Cesar: Thank you very much. Good morning, everybody. As Roger mentioned, my name is Cesar Morales. I am originally from Peru, where I taught English for about 25 years before coming to America. And when I first came to America, well, it wasn’t the first time I was coming to America, I had been as a tourist for a number of times, but with the intention of residing here, it was only back in 2003. So when I came here to the United States, specifically to California, Southern California, Orange County, I enrolled in the TEFL program, just like you. So I was exactly where you are sitting seven years ago—literally the same spot—worrying about my accent, worrying about my grammar, worrying about Roger’s difficult classes or Safineh’s difficult classes that I had to study for. I didn’t have the pleasure of being taught then by Vera, but I did meet her back then as well.
So the thing is that to me personally, it was a very, I would say, a very tremendous sentimental value being able to share the table here at this moment with my dear former instructors and colleagues because UCI to me means everything in the United States. When I came to UCI to study my kids were born, my first one was born, and then everything came after, right after that, the second kid… first job, first OPT, I’m sure you’re familiar with that term, first work authorization, first sponsorship, and I started teaching English as a Second Language here in the United States when I finished this program. As a matter of fact, when I finished this program I went into the evening TESL program, which is Teaching English as a Second Language, and when I finished that, I can tell you for a fact that those two certificates did help me find a job as a teacher of English here in the United States. Starting to work at … college, I remember, and then I went to another college, and another sponsorship. Right now I am the school director at the National school in the city of Anaheim. The name is ?????? where we train our students in medical assisting, dental assisting, vocational nursing, and a couple of IT programs. We also teach English, but we don’t teach ESL, technically speaking, we teach medical English. So we have a curriculum that is structured basically for the Hispanic community that wants to better themselves. Again, thank you very much for the opportunity. Thank you very much for the invitation, and hopefully whatever we can share with you this morning is going to be of some value.
Safineh: Hi, my name is Safineh, and I was born and raised in Iran. The first time I came to the United States I was 17 years old, a senior in high school. I was awarded the American Field Service exchange student scholarship, so I went to Rolling Meadows, Illinois, which is right smack in the middle of the United States to live with an American family and go to high school for a year and do my senior year. My first experience with pronunciation was that they got me a tutor at the high school. It was a lady who worked in one of the business offices. And I would go to her office and she would tutor me in… well, first of all, in Shakespeare, because the seniors were required to take Shakespeare, a Shakespeare class, and I had no idea what the language was all about. And so she would tutor me there. And then there was a gentleman who taught speech at the high school, and they decided that I really needed some pronunciation training to improve my pronunciation skills. I distinctly remember he worked on the pronunciation of the final –ing of, you know, of progressive verbs. And I had no idea why he thought I was not pronouncing it right. You know, it’s eating-g and biting-g, and shopping-g, isn’t it? No, no, no. It’s –ing, -ing. I couldn’t hear this ng, ng, you know. See the back of your throat, and I remember his face, and he actually had some crooked teeth, so I remember that. And he would go ng, ng, and I would get so frustrated. So I don’t know if I’ve gotten it or not, but that was my first experience with pronunciation.
I went back to Iran and went to university. I was a second-year university student when there was a big political revolution and they closed down all the universities. I sat home for about a year and then decided to come to the US and study. I was an English major at home, came here, I thought I would continue to be an English major, and they said huh-uh, your English is not good enough, you know. That was, that was not, that didn’t make me very happy, but it was probably the best experience, academic experience of my life because they put me in an ESL class, and it’s actually because of my ESL teacher that I decided to choose this career. To this day, she was my best, best teacher of all time, and I thought I kind of want to be like her. So that was it. This was 31 years ago.
Vera: My name is Vera, and you guys already know me, all of you, because I taught your class. And I also have a very similar story to Safineh’s because the very first time I came here I was about 17, just like her, and I went to high school, and it was also a scholarship. And prior to that I had very little English experience. So I remember my host family when they came to pick me up at the airport. My host mother told me much later that the only word I understood was “Michael Jackson.” That’s all. And she said that I was completely, I was trying to communicate with them, but I just couldn’t say a word, and I couldn’t understand anything they were saying. For me, it was like Latin. I did not understand. And I didn’t have a lot of training prior to coming here. I could survive, you know, but I couldn’t, but I wasn’t fluent, that’s for sure.
So, I was really luck because I stayed in a great family, and I had two sisters who helped me a lot, and they were about my age. I think that my best teacher was actually my sister because she would correct me all the time. I remember that one time I was, you know, Michael Jackson was very famous back in 1984, right? So I remember that there was a song, “Thriller.” And I used to sing “Threeler,” and I kept saying “Threeler.” And my sister, she got very frustrated, she’d say, “Vera, Thriller! You have to stick your, you know, you have to stick your tongue out.” And so, you know, I’d practice and practice and practice, and then, you know, little by little I started improving, so by the end of six months I was able to speak pretty fluently because I was in a high school setting. And also, I remember I had an English teacher that really helped me. So he, because I was so much lower than the other students, he would give me special assignments. So what he did was, he told me to read articles from Time magazine and Newsweek, and he wanted me to summarize them. And, you know, that really, really helped me. Even though my English was low, I would ask my host mother, because she was great, and she would help me with vocabulary, and by summarizing, I started, you know, building my vocabulary. So by the end of six months I was much better, I was fluent. Of course, you know, not the way I am now, but I was, you know, able to communicate pretty well.
So I went back to Brazil. And then I actually got into college, and I was also an English major in Brazil because I fell in love with the language and I wanted to teach the language back then. So I started, and I finished my degree, and then I decided that I wanted to improve more because I wasn’t happy with my fluency, even though it was pretty good, but I wanted, I wanted more. So I decided to come back here. So I came here in 19… for the second time, in 1991, and I stayed for about two years, and actually I worked as a babysitter, I did all kinds of things, and so I stayed for about two years. Then I decided, well, it was time to go back because my father wasn’t very, you know, his health wasn’t very good, so I went back to Brazil, back then. And then, when I went back to Brazil, I already had a bachelor’s degree in English, so I decided, you know, I’m going to start teaching. So then I taught for about eight years in Brazil, and then I decided, then I got my master’s, and then I decided, you know, actually I want to go back and get more experience. So in 1998 I came back and I actually joined a program that’s very similar to yours at UCI. And it was called, at that time it was TEFL slash TESL, which means that we had, for half the time, for three months, the first quarter, was just like your program, and then the second quarter, it was like the evening TESL, so we had classes with people in the community. And we had, you know, methodology, all the things that you guys are having right now. So after that, then I decided, OK, now I want to work here. So I got an OPT, just like he did. And so I got an OPT, and I got my first job at Santa Ana College. So I taught there for about six months. And then my advisor at the time, he’s not here anymore, his name was John Thomas, and he was very supportive of me from the very beginning. And then he said, I came to visit him one day and I said, “OPT is just for a year, and I don’t know what to do right now.” And then, it was just like amazing, he said, “Well, why don’t you teach here? We actually have openings for the 4-week program.” And then I was interviewed, but then they hired me for the 10-week program. So actually in 1999 I started teaching ESL. And then after a few years teaching ESL, then I started teaching in the TEFL program.
So my journey is similar to yours, to everybody’s here, but I think that, you know, if you have specific questions about pronunciation, I’ll be very happy to answer them. For me, it was really a matter of, I was very motivated. I really, really, really wanted to be better, I really wanted to improve, so I did a lot of different things that I can share with you later to improve my pronunciation.
Mara: Hi. My name is Mara, and I teach here for the 10-week program. My story is a little bit different than the other ones that we heard. Like Safineh, I was born in Iran. I was 15 when I left Iran, and I lived in Europe for a while. I had studied English from the time I was in kindergarten, so I think that’s very similar to a lot of people, but I really couldn’t speak it. I watched TV in English all the time in Iran, and I heard English at home all the time because my mother was raised in England and my father was raised in the United States. They both went to school in those countries, and they spoke English all the time at home to each other. But my brother and I were not allowed to speak English at home. My father really wanted us to speak our native language. And so when I went to Europe, I was one of the people, I lived in Italy at that time, and in my school, my English was really, really good compared to everybody else. I understood everything, as a matter of fact, they put me in a special English class that was a much higher level class. So when we decided to move to the United States, I was pretty confident. I thought, OK, you know, I’ll do really well. And I came in the middle of my junior year in high school, and they gave me a test, and they said, well, you know, your English is pretty good, but you still need to be in an ESL class. I said, “OK, no problem.” So I was in the ESL class, and I remember that the first day of school, in the United States we have homeroom where they make all the announcements over the PA. And you know, they started “Good morning, Chargers,” and they started talking, and I started looking around at everybody else, because I couldn’t understand a thing, the PA was broken. But everybody else seemed to understand everything that was being said.
So for about six months, every day after school I would go home and watch these two sit coms, Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. Some of you know what those are. And probably for the first three months I didn’t understand a word. I would just hear “Blah blah blah blah blah, laugh, blah blah blah blah, laugh.” But by summertime I could understand, by about six months I could understand everything that was going on, so that was really good.
I graduated high school, I went to university, and I did not want to become a teacher, I did not want to become an English teacher. My major was journalism. And, you know, I studied, and everybody said I was a really good writer, and that was great, but everybody didn’t always understand everything I said. So some of the problems that I had with pronunciation was how do you pronounce something like “water” or “water.” The “r” was really hard for me because I would always pronounce my “r’s” like this [trilled /r/]. So I really had to work on those. But I didn’t have a tutor. I didn’t have anybody to help me make, do the pronunciations. And I came here as an immigrant. I knew I was going to stay and live here, probably for the rest of my life. So my goal was to learn English like a native speaker. And I tried hard. I’m not there, and I’ll probably never be there, but that’s OK because I have improved a lot.
And so I decided, after a while I decided I didn’t want to be a journalism major, I wanted to be an English major. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, but I thought, at least if I study English, I will learn English perfectly, and that was my goal. And some of the classes that I took included phonology and syntax, and I really became interested in linguistics. I realized that is what I really like to do. So I started after my bachelor’s degree, I started the linguistics program. And while I was doing that, my advisor told me, “You know, you’ve taken all these classes, and you only need two more classes to be able to get your TEFL, your TESL certificate.