Our Unit 871 Instructor, Caleb, remarks on a critical component for English Language students: Speech Clarity.
Our mission here at Lana’s English language training (ELT) program is to teach the ALC to Vietnamese Military officers. The ALC curriculum focuses on listening and reading skills which are the two major aspects assessed by the ALCPT. We recently had the head of the South Pacific Region for DLI assess our program and give us some feedback. She gave us one critical piece of information from her experience. One of the biggest challenges for all Vietnamese students at DLI was speaking in a way that could be easily understood – speech clarity.
As a consequence, I began to put more time and effort into improving student pronunciation in the following cohorts. It was often quite difficult, because some students have a very wide vocabulary and have a great understanding of grammar. These students can have a high level of confidence, yet make basic pronunciation errors that undercut comprehension. Therefore, students can have these speaking errors hard-wired into their speaking and are not aware of the lack of comprehensibility. In the ensuing cohorts, I’ve been able to identify key areas of difficulty and develop some techniques to address them. Key issues include things such as: final “s” sounds, consonant clusters, medial vowel sounds, syllable stress, and linking words smoothly.
Professional Development in San Antonio
During September, our Hanoi team went to DLI in San Antonio for a week of training and seminars. One of our modules was a phonology session. We looked at a number of common Vietnamese pronunciation problems, were shown the root physical root causes and given a number of very useful techniques to remedy the students’ issues. All of us enjoyed the training, and it confirmed a lot of our specific concerns about Vietnamese pronunciation challenges.
Later that week, we met 3 Vietnamese officers at DLI. They confirmed that speaking clearly and being understood was indeed an obstacle for them at times. More importantly, though the ALC doesn’t test pronunciation, other portions of their training did. For students in specialized fields like aviation, not getting a high enough score on speech clarity could be the difference between continuing further, or spending months in remedial classes.
At the end of the trip, I knew that I needed to prioritize developing methods to help students refine their speech clarity. I will develop methods that could work in the classroom, and also be practiced by students during personal study time. This ensures a bright future for our students by enhancing their speaking score on the ALC exam.