Probably the biggest challenge I think non-native speakers have
is one of prosody.
Now prosody is a term that describes all the things that's going
on when you speak besides the words and the syntax.
So prosody is stuff like speaker rate and pitch and stress, these sorts of things.
And they help us as listeners predict what you're going to say.
They help us understand what you're trying to say and
of course I also change meaning.
So in English of course there's big difference between I
didn't say that and I didn't say that, right?
Those are the exact same words and the exact same order but
very different meanings.
Now, prosody is really difficult for non-native speakers.
I was a student in Russia, and I never got Russian prosody right.
But we know this, and there's been a wealth of research into prosody and
even in fact into non-native speakers of English and English prosody.
I was reading a study earlier this week.
And it was research into international TAs here in the US.
We'll have people come and
study at American universities from all over the world.
And while they're here getting a masters or
PhD they might have an opportunity to teach an American class.
And so depending on the university you'll have
A nonnative of English in front of a primarily English speaking audience.
So there's one study that look at this and what some of those challenges were.
Well, they found that the international TAs and nonnative speakers of English had
a lot of problems with prosity and in fact it made it difficult for
some native English speakers to understand them.
Specifically, non-native speakers weren't really providing intonational units.
So these small chunks, these phrases.
This is an intonation unit, but then again, so is this.
So they weren't providing those sort of phrases, those phrase breaks.
Also many non-native speakers of English had a narrower pitch ranges.
So they weren't raising and lowering their pitch as much as is common in English.
So that's the problem.
What to do about it?
Well It varies, one of the easiest things actually came from that same research
study and says what the problem is, pitch modulation in English.
One thing you can do is just practice pitch modulation.
It's really easy.
And you get a pitch program You can get them on your phones, right?
You can get them on your phone.
You speak into your phone.
It gives you a nice little spectrograph.
And, as you practice, you can try to increase that pitch modulation, okay?
That's one thing to practice.
The other thing I think is a little bit more challenging but more important maybe,
and that's don't focus so much on words, focus more on phrases.
So when I'll work with non-native speakers, I'll be coaching them, and
I'm listening to them, I think, depending on their fluency with English, the focus
is much more on the word, they're trying to think, what do I want to say,
what's that word in English and so they are playing out each word in sequence.
The result is the pros that he cues kind of drop out.
So if am listening they end up talking
more at the level of the word.
And that's hard to listened to.
Why? Because I don't hear individual words.
I want to hear entire phrases.
You speak into level word.
I want to hear total phrases that's clustering together of like ideas.
So my advice to them is I say, hey, put the pauses between phrases.
Don't put them between words.
That's really tough.
That requires getting better at English.
But, if you had a choice between fluidity,
having pauses between phrases instead of words.
And getting grammar wrong or words wrong, choose the fluidity.
Why? Because as an English speaker,
I can hear past a wrong word.
I can hear around bad grammar, but it is a lot more difficult for
me to follow along If you're not speaking in these phrases,
that naturally occurring unit of spoken English.
Index, conclusions, depends on the genre, right?
How you end a eulogy probably different than how you end a business presentation.
