Should the use of K.K. be restricted?

Work Teaching English in Taiwan
1

Should the use of K.K. be restricted?

  • Yes, restricted to those who have had one year or more of Phonics instruction
  • Yes, restricted to those who have had nine months (min.) of Phonics instruction
  • Yes, restricted to those who have had six months (min.) of Phonics instruction
  • Yes, restricted to those who have had three months (min.) of Phonics instruction
  • No restrictions on the teaching of K.K. are necessary
  • Scrap K.K. altogether.

0 voters

The most obvious way to learn a foreign language is this: after some period of intermediate instruction, just memorize one sentence a day. After a year, you have memorized 365 sentences. Even if you devote Sundays to review, and not to memorizing a new sentence, you still have over 300 sentences, or sentence patterns, which you can use to express yourself. Using this material, you can also make up simple dialogues.

However, many of my foreign friends say that the reason such a simple methodology does not work in Taiwan is because the students are afraid to speak. And the reason the students are afraid to speak is because of the K.K. teaching method.

The K.K. teaching method makes so many fine distinctions in pronunciation, (many of which are considered very nit-picking even by native speakers), that the students are afraid to open their mouths.

Contrastingly, my impression is that in Thailand, people will speak to you in English, even though their English is very limited. In Taiwan, at many tourist venues, people will not speak to you in English, even though they have studied English for many years. They are afraid to open their mouths. One of the major reasons for this appears to be the idiotic K.K. teaching method.

By contrast, when I worked in a bushiban here in Taipei for over a decade, our students were not afraid to open their mouths, because they all had a very firm grasp of “basic pronounciation values”, which we taught them with PHONICS instruction. What I noticed about K.K. is that the formulation is very similar to “Chinese”, because the pronunciation value of every word is assigned – there are essentially no “basic” or “standard” pronunciation values. In other words, K.K. does not attempt to tell you how to look at an English word and “derive” the pronunciation from the spelling, K.K. simply assigns the pronunciation to the word. (This appears to dovetail nicely with the Chinese mindset – they don’t have to analyze it or think about it, they just memorize it).

Phonics starts with short and long vowel combinations, examples (a) hat, hate; (e) pet, Pete; (i) dick, dike; (o) tot, tote; (u) mutt, mute. These can then be extrapolated into other words (or “syllables”) by changing the consonants. To those with a solid background in K.K. (and no exposure to phonics) this is a total mystery. Hence my allegation that those who have only studied K.K. have no concept of “basic pronounciation values”.

However, admittedly phonics methodology can only assist you in dealing with about 80% of English language pronunciation. There are lots of exceptions, and of course there are many “two vowel combinations” (eg. ai, ei, oi, ui, ae, eo, uo, oo, etc.) which phonics doesn’t really deal with directly – although you can collect examples and diagram all these out. (K.K. can of course specify the exact pronunciation of each . . . . . . regardless of the number of variations, and this is admittedly a major plus in the minds of Chinese/Taiwanese teachers and students. In other words, in regard to MASTERING ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION, K.K. can get you 100% of the way there, with its “non-natural” teaching method, whereas “phonics” can only get you about 80% of the way there, even though the method is more natural.)

Maybe the entire debate is similar to when you have a cold and you want to decide whether to take Chinese or western medicine . . . . .

At any rate, K.K. has a number of disadvantages. In our bushiban before, we only taught K.K. to students who had had a minimum of four semesters of PHONICS study, and who were familiar with all the phonics concepts. Should such restrictions be implemented in Taiwan in the teaching of English? What does everyone think?

2

How about another category? I think KK should be discarded entirely.

3

Yes, KK should be scrapped altogether. Why not add that category to your poll. It is entirely unnecessary. Remember, Taiwan is the only place KK is used. How’s the level of English in Taiwan.

Brian

4

Flush KK down the toilet and never look back.

5

Of course, learning naturally is the best way for any Taiwanese. However, because Taiwanese outnumber greatly native English speakers, many Taiwanese need to learn by themselves through books or CDs; thus any phonetic system will be helpful.

Nowadays I rarely use any spelling system for Mandarin. I would still tell foreigners Han Pinyin or Bo Po Mo Fo (try my best) if necessary.

6

The KK is absolutely useless!

7

KK was used because it’s easy to drill a large number of students in a system such as this. It also requires no input whatever from the students other than mimicking the teacher’s usually piss-poor pronunciation once or twice during the lesson. It also has the enormous advantage of being easily testable, and the predictably high test scores returned under such a rote system reflect well on schools and teachers. (Wasn’t Confucious a great bloke?)

Note also that the first step in language acquisition is generally held to be acquiring the ability to differentiate between different sounds in the target language (before attempting to reproduce them). Breaking English up in to phonemes to be learnt rote before a single English word or phrase is listened to is absurd, but it is a mechanical procedure which has great appeal to both student and teacher here in Taiwan. Can you imagine charging a student NT$300 an hour just to listen to English being spoken ? Students don’t want to listen to the rhythms, cadences, and intonations of English, and get a feel for how native speakers actually talk. They want to break it down into a stream of letters and spaces, and analyze it as if it were assembly language. Nor do they want to be told that the greater part of real communication is non-verbal (“what the hell am I paying you for then!?”). Of course a general total lack of interest in learning English other than as a means to immediate financial gain doesn’t help either. In three years of teaching here I think I’ve only met one person who was really wholeheartedly into learning English. (You can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink etc.)

What we have to remember is that in Taiwan the most common qualification specified for teaching English is a North American accent. Elsewhere in the world an understanding of second language acquisition and experience are what matter. The American accent thing doesn’t bother me because I’m not American. It bothers me because it shows that people who place these kind of ads don’t care about the great diversity in American accents, and the irrelevance to a beginner of having a teacher with one accent or another. (Have a Filipino or an Indian teach you English for two years. I guarantee to adjust your accent to General American or RP in three months - it’s no big deal) If they are near-fluent students who want elocution lessons in a particular accent or dialect, that is fine, but then they would state their geographical preference (“I want someone from LA”, “I need a New Yorker”, “I’m moving to Louisiana and …”)

As is the norm here, it is a case of the triumph of style over substance. It’s not about teaching English. It’s about making a quick buck at any cost and making it look good. As far as I’m concerned, as long as you have Taiwanese people running buxibans here you will have shite English. As simple as that. Does anyone here have any expectation that a clean politician in the Ministry of Education with no fingers in the buxiban pie will reform the system ? Neither do I.

8

From what I understand about KK (and it seems I don’t understand much about anything these days), it’s based on the IPA which is used to represent all of the sounds of spoken language in the world. As a linguistics major I had to take a course in phonology, basically focusing on the IPA system and other things relating to pronunciation, articulation, and sound correspondence in many languages including minimal pairs and analyzing changes to phonemic representation in actual spoken English (although Farsi and Urdu were my prof’s favorites for us to transcribe phonemically).
Anyways, getting away from undergrad courses from hell… that was a 400-level course and required many hours of linguistics studies in order to take it. I had to learn the British phonetic alphabet this summer as part of my CELTA course and had a hell of a time with it because it did not correspond to the accent with which I speak, let alone important phonemic representations differing from what I was forced to memorize. Most of the people in my course still didn’t get it although that’s what they use to teach English pronunciation in the UK. I think the difference is that they don’t rely on it as strictly the only means for teaching pronunciation where some schools here do. It’s also confusing to adults who have only just mastered the alphabet since some of the characters used in this KK system have different sounds than their corresponding alphabet letter. For example, the letter ‘j’, when /j/ has the same sound as ‘y’ as a consonant.

Of course, I could be wrong about what the KK system is since I have never actually witnessed it being used.

9

these systems have a place, which is basically in the dictionary so that people who know the language to a sufficient extent can look at the little key in the front and figure out to pronounce words they haven’t heard before, it’s needed with the random spelling “system” we have in English.

as for intermediate learners, they really need to hear the pronunciation to get a firm grasp on it. i’m sure 99% of those trying to learn with these symbols and not hearing the words actually being spoken will not succeed to any degree.

for beginning learners, it is Satan. OUT DEMON! yes let’s develop a crutch even before we TRY to piece together the nightmare of English orthography! what a well-considered idea. explaining this to people at my school is always a laugh. half of them look at you like you’re selling them some bullshit line. in fact the main concern of most of them is that the kids have to know it for school. i always explain that once you really understand English pronunciation learning a few symbols won’t be a big deal, first things first.

10

KK is based on the IPA but changes some of the symbols.
See here;
ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/intro%20page8.htm
for details.
If I remember rightly, it arguably simplifies too much by combining two phonemes into one symbol; I can’t remember the example. It may be /o/ and /oh/ as mentioned here;
ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/intro%20page%2025.htm

There are not actually that many differences between the British phonemic alphabet (I presume that’s what you mean; the one with the 44 symbols, right?) and the American ones (I seem to remember there are two major versions commonly in use).

It is used for teaching EFL to adults in the UK. As such I think it can be a useful tool if used carefully.

11

I don’t know what the situation is up north, but down here many jr. high and high schools are phasing out KK…and that is a trend that I think will continue.

12

There is no “British Phonemic Alphabet” or any other such thing. What you probably saw on your CELTA was Adrian Underhill’s arrangement of a subset of IPA as published in Sound Foundations, a diagrammatic representation which he has copyrighted and made a fortune from. If you did your CELTA in London, the “r” symbol indicating rhoticity, for example, will probably have been omitted. I did my CELTA in Belfast, and as we pronounce our "r"s, it was added. Underhill’s diagram is obviously for British English, not General American, but he does refer to the differences in his book. The Scottish accents are not represented in that diagram either - for example there are no triphthongs in Underhill’s chart, but they exist of course in Irish and Scottish English, and I would imagine certain American accents. He has to draw the line somewhere. I too found that section a little overworked, as we had many different accents (including Argentinian) doing the CELTA. I can’t see how anyone studying English in the UK could benefit from learning the IPA except to use a dictionary when no native speaker is around - and that’s not going to be often.

Northern Irish English contains about 48 phonemes or so.

13

Not only is the use of a phonetic system to teach or learn English absolute lunacy, the KK system itself is shite. Where do you thing that horrible Taiwanese accent comes from (you know, it’s not really an American accent, but more like an overblown caricature of a non-American trying to immitate one)? It’s the KK accent.

I studied a little bit of KK in case I ever had to teach it, but I gave up swearing that I never would.

Did you know that KK uses the same symbol to represent the ‘o’ in coffee, the ‘a’ in father and the ‘a’ in walk? I think even Americans would have a hard time getting that to work.

The really stupid thing is that KK is not tested in schools anymore (as of year before last), but buxibans still add it to their ‘menu’ to be competitive “the school down the road teaches, reading, conversation, writing, speech, natural pronunciation AND KK - wow that’s 6 things for the same price of this school which only teaches 5!”.

Also of course “the parents want it”. Well tell them to shut the fuck up. We’re the teahcers - they’re the parents.

Brian

14

What do you understand ‘phoneme’ to mean, Hexuan? I think that it is often confused with other phonetic elements. You mention 48 phonemes in Northern Irish English; is that really 48 sounds which can each individually cause a change in meaning?

You’re presumably aware that if it is necessary to transcribe fully the sounds of speech, including Recieved Pronunciation or whatever may have superceded it, a much more comprehensive phonetic character set is used which gives information about intonation and accent.

A phonemic set has a different purpose - it is solely to distinguish between the sounds which are each capable of delineating meaning. So, for example, the northern English pronunciation of ‘bus’ has a much shorter, more closed vowel sound than that of southern English. But because northern English still makes a distinction between the vowel sound in ‘bus’ and that in ‘spoon’, and because the former does not overlap with any other sounds, the 44-symbol phonemic chart is still valid in that case, provided that you use it as it is meant to be used; phonemically, not as an absolute representation of sound.

It is arguable that it does contain regional bias towards south-eastern England, given that the 44 symbols chosen from the IPA, when used in a phonetic context, give southern English sounds; particularly vowel sounds. There would seem to be grounds for establishing another phonemic chart using symbols completely unrelated to the IPA.

You probably know all this already; it wasn’t quite clear and I’m not familiar enough with Northern Irish English to know whether the 48 sounds are actually phonemes. I would be very interested to know how many of the 44 ‘standard’ phonemes are split or merged in different regions of the UK.

As regards use; I think most of the foreign students I knew in the UK found that chart helpful at times. I think where it excels is in the concept of the ‘schwa’ sound. I think adult students can benefit from this explicit presentation of the ‘schwa’, and the concept of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Of course they complained bitterly that they couldn’t understand a word the Leeds bus drivers said. Perhaps the bus drivers needed an entirely different phonemic/phonetic chart, specific to themselves!

15

[quote=“daltongang”]

as for intermediate learners, they really need to hear the pronunciation to get a firm grasp on it. I’m sure 99% of those trying to learn with these symbols and not hearing the words actually being spoken will not succeed to any degree.[/quote]

I cannot agree any more. I always listen to several different English dictionary softwares many time to grasp on one word. I need phonetic symbols if I want to mimic it accurately. However, for me, words can become active only after using it in real life.

[quote=“daltongang”]
for beginning learners, it is Satan. OUT DEMON! yes let’s develop a crutch even before we TRY to piece together the nightmare of English orthography! what a well-considered idea. explaining this to people at my school is always a laugh. half of them look at you like you’re selling them some bullshit line. in fact the main concern of most of them is that the kids have to know it for school. [/quote]

I guess the successful experience in Mandarin make us become obsessed with KK. I would rather run a BuXiBan nearby your school than persuade any teacher.

16

[quote=“Bu Lai En”]

Also of course “the parents want it”. Well tell them to shut the fuck up. We’re the teahcers - they’re the parents.

Brian[/quote]
Ah, that “the parents want it.” I’ve heard that as though it were off a broken record in both Taiwan and Hong Kong. I once taught in a highschool in Hong Kong where over 50% of the kids’ parents were mainlanders who had never studied English. The rest of the kids’ parents were working class people whose average education level was primary year six. I always got a good laugh when I was told by a senior teacher that I had to do it a certain way because that’s “how the parents want it.” WTF? Yes, I’m going to let my teaching be controlled by a person who left school at age 12. And this is in a society where teachers supposedly get a lot of respect. Actually, I would guess that 99% of the time, it had nothing to do with parents. Unreasonable practices were usually preserved because the local teachers just didn’t want to change. I once had a department head tell me to teach the IPA to a class of Form 6 students who had absolutely no understanding of phonics. I think the IPA can be useful for an advanced student who already has a good grasp of how English words fit (or don’t fit) together. However, I think it is pretty damn useless for someone who has absolutely no clue about the above. This department head just wanted me to teach it because that is what she had learned in university. She thought it would be great for the students to “get ahead.” She of course didn’t realize that the kids were already “behind” because they had no phonics skills (nor did she). That’s pretty common in Hong Kong. I’ve met people there who have managed to reach some level of fluency in English but who have absolutely no idea how to sound a word out or what the individual sounds of vowels or consonants are.
A Singaporian customer came up to our factory in Dongguan a few months ago. Over lunch, he asked me what I did before working in manufacturing. We started talking about teaching and language learning and somehow came to “phonics.” I said that most Hong Kong people have no clue about it. With typical Singaporian arrogance, he said: “oh, my boy is learning phonics in primary 1.” I thought “oh, that’s great.” Then he said: “yeah, he comes home and writes his IPA symbols every night.” At least in this guy’s son’s school, the IPA is considered to be the same as “phonics.” Just imagine that. Being drilled on the IPA/KK at age 6. What a way to murder a language and a child’s will to learn it.

17

[quote=“joesax”]What do you understand ‘phoneme’ to mean, Hexuan? I think that it is often confused with other phonetic elements. You mention 48 phonemes in Northern Irish English; is that really 48 sounds which can each individually cause a change in meaning?

You’re presumably aware that if it is necessary to transcribe fully the sounds of speech, including Recieved Pronunciation or whatever may have superceded it, a much more comprehensive phonetic character set is used which gives information about intonation and accent.

A phonemic set has a different purpose - it is solely to distinguish between the sounds which are each capable of delineating meaning. So, for example, the northern English pronunciation of ‘bus’ has a much shorter, more closed vowel sound than that of southern English. But because northern English still makes a distinction between the vowel sound in ‘bus’ and that in ‘spoon’, and because the former does not overlap with any other sounds, the 44-symbol phonemic chart is still valid in that case, provided that you use it as it is meant to be used; phonemically, not as an absolute representation of sound.

It is arguable that it does contain regional bias towards south-eastern England, given that the 44 symbols chosen from the IPA, when used in a phonetic context, give southern English sounds; particularly vowel sounds. There would seem to be grounds for establishing another phonemic chart using symbols completely unrelated to the IPA.[/quote]

One of the phonemes which exists in N. Irish English and not in RP is the one that represents the final sound in “lough” (or “loch”) which is the only means of differentiating this word from the word “lock”. In N. Irish English the vowel sound in the middle of these two words is identical. In RP, AFAIK, the vowel sound in “lough” is longer than that in “lock”. That’s the only extra phoneme I can think of off the top of my head.

It is also worth noting, in support of what you are saying, that certain N. Irish accents insert a pre-vocalic “y” after certain consonants in some words, for instance, “car” becomes “cyar” in and around the Cavan (“Cyavan”!) border, but this difference in sound does not need to be recorded on the phonemic chart as its presence or absence can have no affect on meaning, and is merely a feature of accent.

I don’t know if I noted down what these mystery extra phonemes were - I’ll check my CELTA notes. It might be interesting.

18

I had an argument with my CELTA tutors over the British phonemic pronunciation of /e/ and the IPA one. In the British they said it was the short ‘e’ sound like in bet . IPA says that it’s actually the long ‘a’ sound as in bait. Both words would be transcribed as /bet/ in their respective systems. The head tutor said that perhaps we learned a different system in the States. A different f_cking system?! It’s an international system for crying out loud. I also had a problem with the chart they used for their version of the phonetic alphabet which had pictures to represent the sounds. Yes, it’s useful for students…but only if they are speaking with the accent that is represented by the pictures. I had one argument where I was almost in tears because one a paper I had written, they marked something wrong where I had used a symbol that exists in the IPA, but not their system. I had a horrible time with the phonics portion of the CELTA in London because of the discrepancies in their system from the one I learned as a linguistics major and the tutors unwillingness to bend (even suggesting that I let my practicum students know I was an American as if to give a disclaimer for my dialect). Finally, I said to hell with them and transcribed the way I had spent 3 months learning rather than a system they expected me to master in just 4 weeks. The consonants were the same as the IPA, but the vowels were different, not just in pronunciation, but in graphemic representation.

Yes, I know, I should have picked a country where they speak the same English as I do, but I chose London because I hope that getting a CELTA from the UK will put me up higher as a job candidate in Europe than if I had earned it in the US.

19

ImaniOU

I don’t understand. The IPA is the IPA. There is no other system. From what you’ve said I would have to think your tutors were wrong. Where did you do your CELTA ?

20

I was searching around following this. If you take the sound samples on this IPA chart:
ling.hf.ntnu.no/ipa/full/ipa … owels.html
as good representations, then the /e/ symbol should have a flat vowel sound; not a dipthong and not necessarily a ‘long’ vowel: something between the ‘e’ of ‘bet’ and the ‘i’ of ‘bit’. Perhaps that’s the sound you use in ‘bait’; I don’t know. In south-eastern English pronunciation ‘bait’ would have a dipthong.

But on the Underhill chart (thanks for the source, Hexuan!) as shown near the bottom of this page the /e/ symbol stands for the more open ‘e’ of ‘bet’:
teacherdevelopment.net/Autho … ysical.htm
This Hong Kong chart (they wrongly label it ‘IPA chart’; it’s actually the symbols from the Underhill one) confirms this:
cuhk.edu.hk/wbt/webctce/cdem … on/top.htm

So this is indeed an inconsistency in usage. In a way, it shouldn’t matter because as I noted above, the Underhill chart describes phonemic elements only. Still, you would expect it to start from a base of consistency. AFAIK, all the other symbols on the Underhill chart represent the 44 phonemes of, well perhaps lets say ‘English’ English, using IPA phonetic symbols which refer to those phonemes as pronounced more or less in Recieved Pronunciation.

I have some sympathy with you on this. I did my Trinity certificate (basically the same as the CELTA) straight after finishing university and feeling quite proud of myself. I was full of university-type scepticism and reasoning.
My tutors on the certificate course were all long-term EFL teachers. They didn’t appreciate me questioning their methods. I had some tough times. If I were to do the course again, I would make more of it by strategically keeping my mouth shut sometimes; taking in the good stuff and learning from my tutors’ undoubted experience; keeping any disagreement to myself for future private consideration.

Did you study the whole of the IPA at university? I’d love to do that sometime. Still, there do exist phonemic charts for American English which of course only take a few of the IPA symbols and do not provide a complete phonetic picture; only a phonemic one. As with the Underhill chart, it’s not correct to call those ones “IPA”, since phonetic description is not their function.
What did the task involve?