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From time to time,  shame related to speaking in a foreign language comes up for discussion in Finland – and that is when Elina Tergujeff starts to get questions.

Ease of understanding is one of the core themes in Tergujeff’s research. She examines intelligibility and ease of understanding of English spoken by Finns, and also how Finns learn foreign-language pronunciation and how it is taught at school. 

Although she has not yet investigated linguistic shame, she has views worth sharing on it. 

“I wish that no language teaching causes linguistic shame. If teaching used to emphasise accurate pronunciation of individual sounds, it should no longer be the case. Sounding like a native speaker is not an objective of modern pronunciation teaching.”&�Բ�����;

Working at the Ģ��ֱ�� as a researcher and Senior Lecturer, Tergujeff has made significant efforts in promoting the new objectives of pronunciation teaching. 

Following the new objectives, she is in favour of a more relaxed approach to language learning:

“For spoken language, teaching aims at fluency. Teachers graduating from our university will bring this message to schools. The teaching of pronunciation aims at helping people to become easily understood.”

Tergujeff also finds it important to promote collaboration and dialogue between speech researchers. She and Postdoctoral Research Riikka Ullakonoja have recently launched a new international webinar series, the Nordic Speech Research Forum.

Pronunciation had a backseat role

At the turn of the millennium, the teaching of pronunciation got a new boost. Until then, pronunciation in school instruction remained secondary to reading and writing skills.

“Pronunciation had a backseat role in teaching. Within applied linguistics, reading and writing skills had a strong presence in the 1980s and 1990s, and this was reflected in school teaching.”&�Բ�����;

At schools, foreign-language pronunciation was mainly learnt through the listen-and-repeat method. When pronunciation research became more common in the late 1990s, teaching methods for pronunciation were also developed. 

was completed in 2013. According to her findings, there is room for development: Teaching focuses on individual sounds, and the methods applied are mostly traditional. The topic garnered a lot of attention. 

Until the framework curriculum for basic education that came into effect in 2016, pronunciation was not explicitly mentioned.

“The framework curriculum obligate English teachers, for example, to practice pronunciation to a large extent already in primary school,” Tergujeff says. “As for content areas, the curriculum mentions word and sentence stress, speech rhythm and intonation.”

Do people understand English spoken by Finns?

In her current research, which has been funded by the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland and the Research Council of Finland, Tergujeff has studied the intelligibility, ease of understanding and accent of English spoken by Finns. The project provides unique information about how English spoken by Finns is understood. 

Tergujeff’s work is focused on English spoken by Finnish ninth-graders, whose ease of understanding and degree of foreign accent were assessed by their English-speaking peers. Finnish teenagers also assessed their Finnish peers’ English.

What was found out?

“Speech fluency is connected to ease of understanding, whereas the  accuracy of individual sounds has no such connection. A particularly important point seems to be that the speaking rate is appropriate. We know from earlier research that too fast, but also too slow speech makes one more difficult to understand. For Finns as language learners, the challenge is slow delivery.”

Pauses make slow speech even more difficult to follow. 

“Frequency, duration and placement of pauses have an impact on ease of understanding,” Tergujeff says. “It is difficult to understand a speaker who frequently makes long silent pauses placed in the middle of sentences. Such pauses make it more difficult to figure out the actual message. In the worst case, it may happen that the listener forgets the beginning of the message before the speaker reaches the end of it.”

Tips for English pronunciation

To make spoken English easy to understand, Tergujeff advises us to pay attention to the following points. These general but important guidelines have been proven to improve ease of understanding.

Tergujeff points out that individual sounds cause intelligibility problems only rarely. Therefore, their training can take a smaller role and a Finnish (or another) accent is allowed. The impact of one’s native language is inevitably audible when speaking a foreign language. 

You can read more about the intelligibility and ease of understanding of English and the priorities of teaching . The article is written to teachers in particular. Tergujeff points out that promoting pronunciation and disseminating pronunciation-related research knowledge at schools is still on-going. 

“Many teachers find that their training did not equip them sufficiently for teaching pronunciation,” Tergujeff says. “In addition, teachers are interested in applying the new objectives and developing their teaching. I have good experiences from teachers’ in-service training and would like to be involved in this also in the future.”&�Բ�����;

Next in her own research work, Tergujeff hopes to study Finns’ attitudes toward various accents of English:

“This might reveal interesting differences between groups and perhaps also a connection to linguistic shame.”