Why bother with the schwa?

May 24th, 2009 · 16 Comments

“A sculpin is any of a family of spiny, large-headed, broad-mouthed, often scaleless bony fishes.”

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5 things that trainee teachers are often taught about the schwa:

The schwa is the most common vowel sound in English (actually very questionable if we are considering the huge number of non-native English speakers in the world)
The sound is very short and weak. It is sometimes described as neutral and colourless.
It can be represented by any vowel letter (a, e, i, o or u): Vegan, kitten, basin, button, Cajun. It can also be represented by many different vowel letter combinations: Britain, cushion, etc.
The schwa is by definition an unstressed sound. In other words, it can only fall on weak syllables. Notice that in all of the example words above, the second syllable is weak.
It is represented by the symbol /ə/

Vegan: /ˈviːɡən/
Kitten: /ˈkɪtən/
Basin: /ˈbeɪsən/
Button: /ˈbʌtən/
Cajun: /ˈkeɪdʒən/
Britain: /ˈbrɪtən/
Cushion: /ˈkʊʃən/

English teachers and English learners aren’t the only ones whose lives are made difficult by this troublesome little sound. Watch 14-year old Trevor Mahoney competing in the 2002 Scripps Spelling Bee competition: Click <here> to watch the clip and pay attention from 1 minute 30 seconds.

Poor Trevor doesn’t know if he is dealing with a schwa (/skʌlpən/) or with the fish and chips vowel (/skʌlpɪn/). This is understandable. When we are dealing with isolated words (i.e. not connected speech), these two sounds can appear very similar:

Basin: /ˈbeɪsən/ (schwa)
Robin: /ˈrɒbɪn/ (fish and chips)

Britain: /ˈbrɪtən/ (schwa)
Mountain: /ˈmaʊntɪn/ (fish and chips)

Woman: /ˈwʊmən/ (schwa)
Women: /ˈwɪmɪn/ (fish and chips)

Personally, I love phonetics and I really enjoyed finding out about the schwa during my teacher training course 8 years ago. But I am a bit of a freak. I can remember that the other traininees on the course hated it. In fact, to them, the schwa became a bit of a joke. Since then, I have often noticed the same attitude among my own trainee teachers.

More importantly, I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say that I have never managed to enlighten a single student of English by introducing him or her to this area of phonetics. On the contrary, I can remember situations in which an introduction to the schwa has resulted in damaged student confidence. Even my Catalan students, who have a similar sound in their language, have been unenthusiastic, to say the least.

In the past, I have introduced the schwa to students in an attempt to improve their listening skills. In other words, I have made it clear that I don’t expect them to produce the schwa sound when they are speaking. But my students have been unenthusiastic about this approach. There is a mentality among language learners that says: “We want to speak like native English speakers.” This is of course unrealistic in most cases. But then so are most other dreams in life.

So my thought for the day is this:

For those of us who like to take an active approach to pronunciation training with our English learners, why bother introducing them to the schwa? If learners pronunciation of words such as vegan, kitten, button, Cajun, Britain or Cushion, is heavily influenced by the vowel letters in the unstressed syllables, keep them right with the ‘fish and chip’ vowel sound.

In other words, although the dictionary says this:

Vegan: /ˈviːɡən/
Kitten: /ˈkɪtən/
Basin: /ˈbeɪsən/
Button: /ˈbʌtən/
Cajun: /ˈkeɪdʒən/
Britain: /ˈbrɪtən/
Cushion: /ˈkʊʃən/

You drill this:

Vegan: /ˈviːɡɪn/
Kitten: /ˈkɪtɪn/
Basin: /ˈbeɪsɪn/
Button: /ˈbʌtɪn/
Cajun: /ˈkeɪdʒɪn/
Britain: /ˈbrɪtɪn/
Cushion: /ˈkʊʃɪn/

I’ll be very surprised if anyone takes any notice of this posting. I asked a couple of teacher friends about their attitudes to the schwa. Their reaction - to roll their eyes and change the subject.

Tags: Pronunciation · Spelling

16 responses so far ↓

1 gweedo // May 26, 2009 at 11:23 pm

ɑɪ ˈsɜ:tənlɪ tʊk ˈnəʊtɪs
gwi:dəʊ ðə ˈbeldʒən
2 Karenne Sylvester // May 28, 2009 at 9:59 pm

Roll eyes. So how’s the footie?

great posting Jamie

K
3 admin // May 28, 2009 at 10:48 pm

hʌləʊ gwi:dəʊ
θæŋk ju: fɒr ju:r cɒment
aɪm hæpi tə nəʊ ðæt ju:r wɪð mi:
həʊp ɒl ɪz wel ɪn beldʒəm
dʒeɪmi
4 admin // May 28, 2009 at 10:53 pm

Thank you Karenne
I am very happy to admit that football is more interesting than phonetics (hence my late replies to these comments).
kəngrætəleɪʃnz bɑrsæ
Jamie
5 Russell Cross // May 29, 2009 at 7:04 pm

Hey Jamie

Just stumbled across your post by accident and it must be Friday ’cause I’m not sure what you are advocating. It sounds like you are suggesting the /ɪ/ is “preferable” but in the examples you give, it would be wrong. Calling a baby cat a /’kɪtɪn/ may occur as a regional thing but /’kɪtən/ is how it’s most likely to turn up in connected speech. In fact, in some cases the /ə/ itself my disappear altogether when there is a final nasal, only to be replaced with the simpler syllabic nasal itself - so the /’kɪtən/ actually becomes /’kɪtn/.

Of course, we’re all limited in our accuracy because it’s hard to hear phonetic details with precision. The schwa can be argued to be phonemically “real” but phonetically a little cluster of potential sounds made “somewhere” in the mid-central region of the buccal cavity.

For example, we might agree that /’kɪtən/ and /’kʊʃən/ have the schwa in there, but at the finer phonetic level, the tongue in the second /ə/ is a little lower, conditioned by the [ʃ] sound. For the purpose of a broad transcription, the schwa is fine, but a fine transcription may reveal a different sound there. This is what I mean by saying that phonetically, the schwa could be seen as a shorthand for a cluster of possible sounds.

Nevertheless, the reduction of many vowels to the schwa is very common in English and maybe that’s why is IS so tricky to teach! Teaching that you say “potato” as /pə’teɪteu/ in isolation but /pə’teɪtə/ in rapid or concatenated speech is tough indeed!

Perhaps it would be easier to teach ONLY the schwa Hey, it sounds a little odd at first but after a while, I bet we’d get used to it!
6 admin // May 30, 2009 at 11:17 am

Hello Russel

Really good to hear from you. Thanks for taking the time to leave such a constructive comment. If you were unable to work out what I am advocating, it is probably a reflection of my own confusion regarding this point. It was one of those situations where the thesis (if there is one) comes to you as you write.

Let me try to summarise my thoughts better and I will be very interested to hear what you think.

1. I agree with everything you have said here. The schwa is not the same as the /ɪ/ vowel and I like the way you describe it as: “… phonemically ‘real’ but phonetically a little cluster of potential sounds made ‘somewhere’ in the mid-central region of the buccal cavity.” Also, I have noticed words such as kitten being transcribed as either /kɪtən/ or /kɪtn/ for example on the Macmillan online dictionary: http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/kitten

2. In the past, I have used the 5 words (vegan, kitten, basin, button, Cajun) to present the schwa to my English learners. I liked them because the 5 vowel letters are represented but the schwa sounds in each case. Incidentally, I also made them aware of the term schwa and tried to drill them so that they sounded like native-English speakers.

3. You wrote that “Calling a baby cat a /’kɪtɪn/ may occur as a regional thing but /’kɪtən/ is how it’s most likely to turn up in connected speech”. This is a very important point for me. I think that it was wrong for me to drill my Spanish learners to speak like a native English speakers when they already have their own natural, regional accents (i.e. Spanish English accents). I think that if anyone is going to naturally call a kitten a /kɪtɪn/ even in connected speech, it would be them.

4. If my students have a natural tendency to say /kɪtɪn/ rather than / kɪtən/ (even in connected speech) then perhaps I have been wasting my time introducing them to the schwa. So the conclusion is, use the /ɪ/ sound as a sort of ‘default’ representation of that cluster of potential sounds made in the mid-central region of the buccal cavity.

The problem here, perhaps, is that a new issue is introduced. Language models for learners: Do we want our students to speak like native or non-native English speakers. This point never fails to divide people - both learners and teachers.

PS I like your blog
http://thewordguy.wordpress.com/
7 Mr D // May 31, 2009 at 1:28 am

A bendy yellow fruit is a binani?

(Sorry - couldn’t resist!)
8 will tichener // Jun 13, 2009 at 5:33 am

Isn’t the interesting thing with Kitten not the schwa but the loss of the t and appearance of the glottal stop?
9 admin // Jun 13, 2009 at 1:07 pm

That all depends on how you pronounce the word. Where are you from Will?
10 Will // Jun 13, 2009 at 4:05 pm

Originally South London, hence my interest in the glottal stop, but at the moment Germany, I know Karenne actually. I edit English Teaching Matters, it is a mag for teachers in Stuttgart. I follow teflclips closely but until recently haven’t had the time to explore the blog. I was wondering if you fancied writing a piece on clips for ETM? Don’t have any cash but interested bunch of teachers and always happy to raise awareness of teflclips. Wouldn’t you say a glottal stop is a natural result of fast speech for an English native speaker? Gotta get back to my sunburn…
11 Alex Case // Aug 29, 2009 at 2:26 pm

I have always found schwa interesting and fun to learn, and the idea that they can work on something to improve their listening rather than just listen a lot very motivating. To pronounce it, I get them to totally relax their faces and say Er? like an idiot teenager being asked a question (almost any question, at least for me in my teens!) Being able to recognise the schwa and being told that it is never stressed (unlike the other short sound you are talking about) can also help students work out where the word stress is. Can’t say that any of that leads to native speaker accents or leaps in listening comprehension, but it feels like a small but productive step and is therefore popular with students
12 jennie // Sep 13, 2009 at 8:17 pm

More importantly, I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say that I have never managed to enlighten a single student of English by introducing him or her to this area of phonetics.
On the contrary, I can remember situations in which an introduction to the schwa has resulted in damaged student confidence.

Hi! Very interesting article, my eyes they are not a-rollin! Hmm though, ive had the opposite experience, both with young learners and adults. Familiarising them with the schwa sound not only helps them pronounce and hear word stress better, but also gives them a key to hearing and producing the rhythm of English, sentence stress. I´ve found this has given them more confidence, as they atune their listening skills better to listen for key stressed words, it helps them understand and not freak out if they hear parts of sentences that are garbled (eg how do you do - how j do) and over time their own rhythm becomes more “native” like, which makes them even more confident.

Hope you have a successful schwa class in the future! I find clapping out songs while saying the lyrics with the stressed vowels exaggerated and the schwas really unexaggerated is really useful for students, and randomly correcting sentences with bad rhythm in correction slots, or focusing on a short text to beat out the rhthym as we read, sometimes identifying the schwas as the unstressed syllables…. most of my students have responded well to this being done with a lot of humour (i get rap star with them sometimes)
13 Nick Jaworski // Sep 22, 2009 at 9:09 am

I think this, like many matters in ELT, varies by country and language. When I worked in East Asian countries, pronunciation was incredibly important and could justifiably take up significant portions of the lesson. Because many East Asian language learners can’t even hear many sounds in English or the differences between similar sounds, learning the phonetic alphabet and focusing on specific phonetic elements is really important.

Specifically for Turks, they often have difficulty understanding the fact that long vowels and short vowels change the meaning of a word (in Turkish it merely shifts emphasis), so highlighting this fact is very useful in the classroom whereas it may not be useful in other languages where this is also the case.

However, I find that, in many languages where such problems do not occur, this tends to be a waste of time. For many language learners, the schwa sound itself is not hard to pronounce, so we don’t need to focus there. Moreover, in English, spelling does not offer much in the way of a useful pronunciation guide, so explaining that some words have a schwa while others do not even though there is no spelling change is like pointing out the difference between blood and food or caught and laugh. There is no real way to determine if a word will contain a schwa sound so how does it really help the learners?

One of the things that makes English difficult to learn on your own is a lack of phonetic spelling; however, there are a number of online dictionaries that include sound clips with both American and English accents. I always tell my learners to use these.

Another point to consider, and one which I think is quite serious, is that students need to pronounce words as accurately as possible despite their accents. Many Turks constantly try to pronounce words according to Turkish phonetics, a normal response for any language learner. But, especially as students move up in levels, this continued habit shows that the student still has not understood that there is a fundamental difference between the languages and is failing to internalize English phonetics. They are still thinking in Turkish. This often leads to communication breakdown, which is what we definitely want to prevent. On first arriving in Turkey I had a hell of a time understanding my students’ mispronunciations. Of course now I don’t notice, but we have to think back to that time and understand that, when our learners speak with others who are not familiar with Turkish speaking problems (as most people are not) they will not be understood.

For this reason we have to focus on acceptable pronunciation. There is of course a range that many speakers will understand and if pronunciation falls in that range it’s okay, but many learners try to apply their native phonetics to English and this results in communication breakdown. On top of this, students who do not practice correct pronunciation in class never develop an ear for it and cannot understand speakers because of it. For example, in Turkey most Turks have trouble hearing, a, the, on, of, and any contractions because they never use them in their speech or they pronounce them incorrectly. If the students do not use correct pronunciations with each other, they do not understand it when it’s said by others and often meaning is lost or communication fails.

In the end, it depends on the learners’ native language, but most of the time I think the scwha sound falls into the category of useless extra language knowledge. For example, at my school I’m supposed to teach the difference between transitive and di-transitive verbs or the difference between objects, complements, and adverbials. This information makes things seem more complicated than they are and results in learners becoming grammarians rather than users of English. Having our students use the correct pronunciation of the schwa can be important for communication, but, more importantly, it reinforces the idea that English pronunciation and the student’s native language’s pronunciation is different. To single the sound out for special attention though, seems a bit useless. When speaking, students are not going to stop and think, “now should this be a schwa or not?” What students need to do is mimic words they hear as accurately as possible. If they are reading the words and don’t know the pronunciation they should ask their teacher or refer to an online dictionary with sound.
14 Jess // Jun 1, 2010 at 3:20 am

Thank you for your efforts to clarify the schwa sound in English. I have had a head injury and have had to relearn much of the language I had taken for granted. As hearing language sounds and translating this to spelling has been damaged, the confusion of the schwa challenged my already vulnerable confidence. So, finding out about it (in a way that is easily understood) has made a huge difference to my progress. The schwa sound is important when you can’t take it for granted.
15 admin // Jun 1, 2010 at 7:35 pm

Hello Jess
Really sorry to hear about your situation.
I can only imagine how difficult things have been.
It is really interesting to read you comment and I would be really interested to hear more about how you are getting on.
Jamie
16 David Andersen // Aug 10, 2010 at 1:45 pm

I think the schwa sound is a celebration of ignorance, a codification of sloppiness like ebonics. We might call it Honky-bonics since it codifies the poor enunciation of white folks instead of blacks. Like the dropping of a ‘t’ that renders “scattered” as ’skadard’, the schwa sound merely represents the miserable failure of most people to enunciate their vowels. It is not something that should be taught as legitimate, just as a mistake to be avoided. I recall it was very confusing to be taught this sloppiness was acceptable as a child, and I recall rejecting it eventually as incompatible with a bright future in use of the language. English vowels exist for very good reason: to extinguish ambiguity and vagueness. Our language should be optimized for precision of communication on the first try, every time it’s used.