Teaching Tips

The Tic Tac Trick to Teach the American English Articulatory Setting

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Abstract

Second language pronunciation instruction typically begins with a focus on articulation or the manner in which to produce individual vowels and consonants. Lacking from the teaching and learning of English pronunciation, however, is instruction on the language’s articulatory setting (AS), or default position for articulators. Surprisingly, since as early as Sweet (1890), it has been pointed out that unique to each language are its underlying tendencies, habitual configurations, or default positioning of the articulators (lips, jaw, tongue, and velum). The concept of language- specific underlying tendencies was termed articulatory setting by Honikman (1964) and defined as the “gross oral posture and mechanics both external and internal, requisite as a framework for the comfortable, economic, and fluent merging and integrating of the isolated sounds...” (p. 73). Consequently, AS offers increased efficiency and effectiveness of pronunciation instruction because it underlies sound production and provides the tools to over-come cross-linguistic transfer tendencies, which often impede L2 pronunciation.

How to Cite:

McGregor, A., (2017) “The Tic Tac Trick to Teach the American English Articulatory Setting”, Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Proceedings 9(1).