By Ji Hyun Lim
AsianWeek Staff Writer
A soft, motherly voice flows out of the computer speakers, enunciating each word with careful deliberation. “Ever had a dancing partner whose rhythm and timing was off?” it asks. “There is a music behind English language that is critical to being understood.” The narrator of the CD-ROM continues, adding that pronunciation is key to clear communication in America.
In response to the lucrative and growing demand from students and professionals who seek to improve their pronunciation skills, AmEnglish.com has recently released an interactive CD-ROM called “TOEIC Pronunciation in American English” that aims to accommodate those who have little time but are eager to clearly communicate with native-speaking colleagues and peers.
According to software developers, interactive CD-ROMS were first produced in reaction to demands in Silicon Valley. Kathy Han, a software developer who has taught ESL for 20 years, created the Pronunciation CD in 1999, co-branded it with the Educational Testing Service and has re-released it this month to tech companies and universities such as IBM and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others.
Because the Silicon Valley and Bay Area had become home to new immigrants who are professionals or looking for jobs in the hi-tech industries, many software companies were rushing to accommodate this need. Through focus group experiments, AmEnglish.com found out that there were many people with professional degrees who wanted to advance in their fields, who felt that their English skills were holding them back.
“It’s a matter of communicating with the staff, and if [students] are not understood, then it affects their ability to manage,” said Susie Miller, an administrator with the University of California, Santa Cruz Extension. “Those in product development, they often have to make presentations to stockholders and groups of new managers on how to products must be, and must do it as well as possible.”
Kenneth Tom, a speech pathologist and professor at California State University, Fullerton, argues that foreign accents should not be considered a speech impediment.
“Many people are treated unfairly in work groups because they’re perceived to be different linguistically, thus creating a glass ceiling by their perceived differentness or difficulty at all of being understood,” said Tom. “Some people who are engineers or nurses get tired of seeing white people get promoted before them even though they’re senior to them and know more. Some of them say that it’s probably because they might be hard to understand, especially over the phone or they have problems when they say medicine names. It’s a little bit of a barrier.”
AmEnglish.com’s CD-ROM covers stress, intonation and rhythm of the English language in 10 foreign languages including four Asian languages — Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese and Korean.
Tom points out that such interactive software may oversimplify pronunciation problems, which renders the program less effective. The software may focus on drills, but it does not interactively check and correct pronunciation, nor can it notice subtleties such as over-pronunciations and American elisions.
“When a baby learns to speak, he learns the intonation and the rhythm, then the sounds,” Tom said. “[When learning a] foreign language, we usually go backwards because we already have the intonation and rhythm. You learn these new individual words artificially through categories.”
David Hans, marketing and sales director of AmEnglish.com, points out that working on individual sounds is difficult for an adult to change because a palette may harden, making it difficult to re-create sounds.
“A child growing up in any culture will be a native speaker no matter who they are,” Hans said. “If you’re not a native speaker of English, the rhythm patterns are different. English is a highly stress-timed language. The native English speaker is anticipating a stress pattern to quickly understand what you’re saying.”
Still, universities like UCSC vouch that this CD-ROM and an on-site coach can assist those who seek to improve pronunciation skills. Miller explains that the CD-ROM gives the students an option to study and complete on-line training courses. Especially for the time-starved, the extension course allows three months and a distance coach for a $429 fee.
Said Tom: “There is the point of view that if we really want to be a multicultural society, we all need to be more flexible in our listening skills. I think for people to move within a multicultural society, there’s different ways of talking. You have to [tolerate] more than one accent in your English.”
Reach Ji Hyun Lim at jlim@asianweek.com. |
