One of my Chinese students asked me a question and I was not familiar with his terminology.
Point to clarify - these are university-educated students of very high ability; unfortunately they have been taught “book English” and are extremely weak on conversational English, so while they *understand* things at university and grad-school level, they express their questions at grade-school level with very difficult-to-understand accents. So we have to interpolate a lot here.
It seems there are two “standard” pronunciation systems being taught, one called “KK” and one caled “DJ” (or something like that - reproducing phonetically through an accent) My student wanted to know which I was using and I had to answer that I would try to find out what the terminology means. Can anyone out there clarify this for me?
Re: Cheryl and other speech-language people -- a question
We’re working on it — a lot of rather atypical problems.
I am familiar with the IPA, and so are many of these students (again, problem isn’t knowledge, it’s application).
We’re just trying to figure out what this pronunciation terminology refers to.
I have never heard of those terms or abbreviations, however, there are universal symbols in phonetics that are used to represent most sounds found in various languages. The symbols are part of the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA…Perhaps you can work on their pragmatics or social usage of language… A easy program to implement would be Conversations by Barbara Hoskins. It is published by Thinking Publications.