Phoneticians and thinking language learners

Recently a colleague posted this article on FB through VenTESOL.  It was originally given as a talk at Seoul University in 1996.  Consider,

In this talk I want to discuss the usefulness and importance of phonetic transcription for people studying languages. Since most of you here are phoneticians, you are presumably already convinced of this; I may be preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, there are many language teachers who appear to be far from converted, and I believe that certain arguments do need to be spelled out.

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For the language learner, a passive acquaintance with phonetic transcription enables him or her to extract precise and explicit information on pronunciation from a dictionary, bilingual or monolingual.

Without this information, a learner risks being misled either by an inadequately trained ear or by the dazzling effect of the ordinary spelling.

It should be difficult to imagine language teachers who are not impressing the significance of phonetic transcription upon their students.  Yet here, and based on experience, we see that many teachers are reluctant or even ignorant of IPA and its value.

As with many places where linguistics ties so directly to language learning, it is useful to consider how much a student of language should learn about linguistics.  Some complain that the topics are not appealing enough to learners.  Well, learning a language is not always a trip to the carnival, and learning phonetic transcription should become so much more than "a passive acquaintance" with which one can "extract precise and explicit information on pronunciation from a dictionary."  Of course, that is fully appropriate for a language student, but what about the value of learning the details of phonetics?

What about language students who study how these sounds vary between languages and within a single language? Learning to pay attention to such small details as described in this paper (how a phoneme /t/ changes based on preceding and proceeding sounds) trains the ear and the mind to pay closer attention to speech, and with appropriate direction, one's own speech.  Thus a learner begins to notice subtle clues that suggest how to make appropriate change toward more accurate pronunciation (or production, or writing, or listening).

Rather than studying how words sound by staring at some poorly understood symbols in a dictionary, language students become novice phoneticians, novice linguists, using the riches of the field to gain confidence, control, and autonomy.  To improve progress and depth of learning for language students we must devise plans with topics and projects on linguistic analysis and scientific study of an array of socio-linguistic phenomena.  Such critical study of details in the field of linguistics dovetails perfectly with self-analysis and self-assessment of language proficiency and learning strategy/outcome.  It's not to say that as language learners advance they should not study other topics, but language courses typically taught with a text full of somewhat arbitrary readings and activities would be well served by such a change in focus.  Even low-intermediate learners could manage simplified readings on these topics and develop their own analyses or surveys to make comparisons or study some other communicative detail such as facial gestures.

Just today I listened to a colleague talk about an ap for diagramming sentences--yes!  Learners need to become experts in how languages work.  Yes, we need content, but their is plenty of stimulating content, chock full of potential critical study, in the field of linguistics.  I also personally find x-bar structure more elegant that the traditional grammarian's sentence diagram if students are going to do some sentence structures, but anything would be a good start.