Teaching Tips

Teaching Schwa: Using ‘Stuttering’ to Improve English Pronunciation

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Abstract

Taking an articulatory perspective, the phonetician JC Catford distinguished schwa from other vowels in English, and further distinguished two types of ‘schwa’: one vowel-like (e.g. the final sound of ‘tuna’) but the other non-vocalic and incidental, the result of a particular type of transition from one consonant to the next: an ‘open transition’. This can be pedagogically conceived as intentional ‘stuttering’, which is a familiar starting point for students to learn authentic production. When they have this experiential understanding of what reduction is, there is a positive carryover into their production of the other type of schwa, and a change in what they expect to hear in native speech. This enhances their comprehension of spoken English.

How to Cite: Young, R. & Messum, P. (2022). Teaching schwa: Using intentional ‘stuttering’ on consonants to improve English pronunciation. In J. Levis & A. Guskaroska (eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, held June 2021 virtually at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON. https://doi.org/10.31274/psllt.13367