Many English learners understand that learning English involves learning a combination of grammar rules, vocabulary words, and pronunciation patterns. However, when it comes to working on pronunciation, I find that there are several misconceptions among learners about how to pronounce English.
I don’t just mean vowel sounds (a, e, i, o, or u) or consonant sounds (r, th, v, z) or blends or combinations of consonants (bl, str, sp). Rather, there are important underlying concepts that affect pronunciation that learners are not always aware of, and, unfortunately, being unaware of these concepts can affect both the ability to produce intelligible speech and to clearly recognize and understand spoken English.
Words do not exist in isolation. The meaning of a word can depend on the context or the surrounding words and the intended interpretation, association, connotation, or usage of a word or phrase. Similarly, many common words are pronounced differently based on their position and function in a sentence, which very often surprises learners who perhaps only know one pronunciation of a word.
This can lead to confusing and frustrating interactions in English class,
Learner: “How do I pronounce ‘can’?”,
Teacher: “Well, it depends.”
Lerner: “It depends on what?”
Teacher: “On context.”
Learner: “For example, how do I pronounce ‘can’ in the question ‘Can I help you?'”
Teacher: “Please don’t get mad, but again, it depends. Are you placing emphasis on ‘help’ or asking for consent before helping? It also depends on if you are highlighting the person who is helping, ‘I’, or the person being helped, ‘you’.
With 4 different words in, “Can I help you?”, there could be four different ways to ask that question with possibly four different interpretations.
1) Can I help you? (There is emphasis on ‘can‘ to obtain consent before helping.)
2) Can I help you? (There is emphasis on ‘I‘ to highlight who is offering to help.)
3) Can I help you? (The emphasis is on ‘help‘, the action, without first asking for consent.)
4) Can I help you? (The emphasis is on ‘you‘, the person receiving help, as a contrast with other people who might need help.)
When we emphasize ‘can‘ in the first question to ask for consent before offering to help, ‘can‘ uses strong pronunciation: /kæn/. In the other three questions, where the emphasis shifts to one of the other words in the sentence, ‘can‘ is no longer in the spotlight, and as a result, its pronunciation becomes weak: /kən/ or /kn/, thus allowing another word to be in the spotlight and catch the listener’s attention instead.
With this one example, we can observe that pronunciation depends on emphasis and stress. A word in the spotlight is a stressed word with strong pronunciation, and a word that is not in the spotlight is an unstressed word with weak pronunciation. This is why a teacher may reply, “it depends”, when asking how to pronounce a word, because the pronunciation depends on the context, surrounding words, and intended meaning of the word and utterance. Pronunciation is not simply a one-size-fits-all sound. The word takes other words into account and adapts to its surroundings.
Here is a pronunciation example to highlight how tonic syllable stress can affect the pronunciation of ‘can’. Even though we see the letters ‘can’ in each word, none of the examples are pronounced /kæn/ because ‘can’ is in an unstressed, weak syllable. “The American applicant’s canoe is in the canal.“
/ði əˈmɛrəkən ˈæplɪkənts kəˈnu ɪz ɪn ðə kəˈnæl/
As you look up words in a dictionary, notice the apostrophe symbol ˈ that precedes the primary stress syllable. As a general rule, a syllable just before and just after a primary stress syllable will be an unstressed or weak syllable. When a syllable is unstressed or weak, its vowel will reduce and be pronounced as either /ɪ/ or /ə/. /ə/ is also known as schwa, and is considered the most frequent sound in the English language. For many English learners, the concept that syllable stress affects the pronunciation of both stressed and unstressed syllables is very unfamiliar.
Syllable stress and its effect on vowel sounds are just one part of English pronunciation. Another important feature is syllable length. Syllable stress not only requires a stressed syllable to be louder than the surrounding syllables, a stressed syllable must also be longer. By contrast, an unstressed syllable is softer and shorter.
The concept that a loud syllable is also long is not intuitive for many speakers of syllable-timed languages, such as French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin and Cantonese, Korean, Turkish, and Telugu. A syllable-timed language generally has syllables of equal or similar duration. English, by contrast, is a stress-timed language, meaning that the syllable durations are of variable length and syllable stress affects the rhythm and flow of the language. Other examples of stress-timed languages are German, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Russian, and Thai.
With a syllable-timed language, such as Spanish, the number of syllables in a sentence will variably affect how long it will take to say the sentence aloud. However, with English as a stress-timed language, this is not necessarily the case. The stressed syllables will align at regular intervals, but the weak or unstressed syllables in between will shorten and compress.
When learners often hear English speakers who lengthen stressed syllables and shorten unstressed syllables, they get frustrated that they do not clearly hear all of the syllables being spoken. However, this is an intentional feature of spoken English. Not word in a sentence is equally important and not every syllable is equally important. Learners eventually need to develop focused or selective listening to mainly pay attention to the long-loud syllables and words that comprise the important words of a sentence.
If a listener can only identify the long-loud syllables and get the gist of a sentence based solely on those syllables and words, that is desirable and enough for a general understanding. Learners often make the mistake of wanting to hear every syllable spoken, and when speaking, they often want to clearly articulate every syllable. That, unfortunately, will hold learners back from advancing with their English studies.