Working on English Pronunciation, Far and Wide, Top to Bottom

Dear Fellow Earthlings,

All of my Jingles clients present various challenges for me as I work to help them develop their target language allophonomes (their target language phonological systems).

A good case in point is Ms. H, who wishes to become capable of pronouncing nativelike England English, North American English, and Australian English. Ms. H has made enormous strides in her pronunciation to date. Recently she is consistently pronouncing her North American English with scores of "90" (the threshold score for native speakers of a given language).

Ms. H wishes to be able to produce England English and Australian English with the same degree of competency that she demonstrates in her North American English production. She is off to a good start on both, but is beginning to realize that even for native speakers of English, it takes effort and talent for a speaker of one dialect to sound like a typical speaker of another dialect: Americans cannot easily pass themselves off as English, Australians cannot sound American unless they work at it, and so on...

But even as Ms. H aspires to the lofty goal of emulating native speakers of the 3 above-mentioned major dialects of England-based English, her basic Jingle (JINGLE A, the source Jingle of all the other Steve Walker Jingles -- and indeed the source Jingle of all regular mode renditions of England-based English) is in need of alignment, of adjustment, of development, of improved control mechanisms.

Whenever Ms. H and I do her Jingles worksheets these days, we are encountering pockets of weakness, areas in need of repair, cracks, warped gestures, non-nativelike prosody, and other speech motor skills deficiencies. We do not shy away from dealing with them on the spot -- although we both realize that there is always the possibility that attempting to adjust any form of task dynamic mechanisms can lead to a string of new problems due to our interventions.

Nevertheless, she really wants to have nativelike control of the "three Englishes" mentioned here. If anyone can achieve this, it is Ms. H! Her homework for next week appears to be simple on the surface, but it is not. She must bring to bear all of her hard earned Jingles performance techniques to develop her pronunciation of the basic expression:

"No, I won't go to the zoo."

England: Neou oay WeouNt geou tu thu zuW

North American: Nou ay WouNt gou tu thu zuW Australian: N~aey ~aey W~aeNt g~ae tu thu züW.

Steve Walker Earthsaver and Jingles Creator

© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.