I warned you last month that I was going to introduce you to a highly original double act, but joking aside, what we are looking at when we consider the work of Bryan Jenner and Jennifer Jenkins is a turning point in the history of pronunciation teaching.
The aim of pronunciation teaching may have initially been seen as providing learners with a native-speaker accent, but as early as 1949 voices were being raised against this unrealistic goal. The most significant of these was David Abercrombie, the first Professor of Phonetics at the University of Edinburgh, who argued that most learners ‘need no more than comfortably intelligible pronunciation’ (Abercrombie, 1949: 3). His idea was taken up later by Joanne Kenworthy in Teaching English Pronunciation when she also argued that for most learners being ‘comfortably intelligible’ was a far more reasonable goal than aiming for a native-speaker accent (Kenworthy, 1987: 3).
In an article published in Speak Out! the journal of the IATEFL Pronunciation Special Interest Group, phonetician Bryan Jenner put forward a concept that, unbeknown to anyone at the time, was a game-changer. Earlier work by Jenner had gone into significant detail as to how to master a native-speaker accent of English (Jenner, 1987), but in 1989 he surprised quite a few of us by changing track altogether, and arguing that it was now appropriate also to consider those learners who, for one reason or another, do not want or need to sound entirely native–like, and to establish a lower-level objective for them. In order to be able to do this, it seems to me essential to establish what all native speakers of all native varieties have in common which enables them to communicate effectively with native speakers of varieties other than their own. This will enable us to set up a common core for pronunciation, which would offer the learner a guarantee of intelligibility and acceptability anywhere in the world.
(Jenner, 1989: 2. Italics in original).
Having just finished her doctorate on the acquisition of second language phonology, Jennifer Jenkins was working as the Head of Teacher Training at the English Language Teaching Centre of King’s College London. She quickly spotted the importance of Jenner’s Common Core, but set about modifying it because of the significance of the changes in the role of English in the world. Seven years is nothing in the development of a living language, but the seven years between 1989 and 1996 could have been seven centuries in terms of what happened to English, which almost overnight (or so it seemed at the time) had become a global language.
Openly acknowledging Jenner’s work and the importance of guaranteeing ‘intelligibility and acceptability anywhere in the world’, Jenkins set about modifying the common core in order to take into account various factors, key amongst which was the changing demographics of the use of English. Even back then (and it’s not actually that long ago), it was understood that English was being spoken far more between NNSs than between NSs and NNSs, i.e. that English was predominantly being used as a lingua franca (ELF) or international language (EIL).
Jenkins agreed with Jenner that ‘the starting point is intelligibility for the listener’, but deliberately took into account the new role of English, and hence clarified that ‘whereas Jenner’s listener is a NS, mine is a NNS’ (Jenkins, 1996: 17).
The rest, as they say, is history. Jenkins’ modified common core finally morphed into what is now widely known as the Lingua Franca Core (LFC). This is such an essential construct if you want to understand pronunciation teaching today. I think it would be useful to round off by pointing out three major differences between the Jenner and Jenkins cores:
- Jenner’s Common Core examined the way in which native-speaker varieties of English manage to be mutually intelligible (if indeed they do). By identifying the common features of all NS varieties, he argued, we would know what to teach learners to make them comfortably intelligible to NS listeners. Jenkins’ lingua franca core took the nonnative–speaker listener as the default setting, relegating NS norms to a back seat for the first time. ‘One small step for (wo)man. One giant leap for…’, or something to that effect.
- Jenner’s work was based principally on his extensive knowledge of the phonetics and phonology of different native speaker varieties of English. Jenkins’ data was strictly empirical and came from ‘a large corpus of data collected in multilingual classrooms’ (Jenkins 1996: 17). For far too long pronunciation work had been based on assumptions, theoretical considerations, or data gathered under laboratory conditions. Jenkins had dared to go out into the real world to see how pronunciation worked in conditions of authentic communication between NNS interlocutors.
- Numerous commentators such as Jenner, Bradford, myself and others, saw lists of priorities as offering learners an attainable but lesser goal than that of a NS accent. Jenner talks of ‘a lower–level objective’ (1989: 2), and even today many of us make explicit or implicit references to the notion of ‘going for gold, but settling for silver’ (i.e. of not winning, i.e. of failing). Even Jenkins’ own work also initially contains references to the idea of the LFC being in some ways ‘basic’ or ‘less than’. But such references quickly disappear as it becomes clear to her that competence in the LFC isn’t an indicator of failed native-speaker competence. Rather it’s the foundation of full ELF competence, and is the first step on your learner’s road to global success in the pronunciation of English. But more about that when we get to the letter ‘L’.
References
Abercrombie, D. (1949). Teaching pronunciation. English Language Teaching, 3: 113–122.
Bradford, B. (1990). The Essential Ingredients of a Pronunciation Programme. Speak Out! 6: 8–11.
Jenkins, J. (1996). Changing Priorities. Speak Out! 17: 15–22.
Jenner, B. (1987). The wood instead of the trees. Speak Out! 2: 2–5.
Jenner, B. (1989). Teaching Pronunciation: The Common Core. Speak Out! 4: 2–4.
Kenworthy, J. (1987). Teaching English Pronunciation. Longman.
Walker, R. (1994). Phonetics in a Communicative Classroom. Speak Out! 13: 23–29.
