My fair lady (1964) is a classic movie about a Cockney flower girl, Eliza, who takes lessons from professor Higgins, a phonetician, to pass as a lady. After watching, I find connection between the movies and myself in terms of language learning experience. This writing will reflect on two chief issues that are methods of phonetic and phonological training and the relationship between phonetic teacher and learners.
Regarding to methods involving phonetic and phonological training, there are many methods applied during learning process, I am going to focus on two teaching methods used are drilling, and putting marbles in mouth. For the first method, Eliza is forced to stay lonely in a room and enunciate vowels unremittingly.
“You simply cannot go on working the girl this way. Making her say her alphabet over and over ... from sunup to sundown, even during meals.”, Mrs. Pearce (the housekeeper) says.
It is worth noting that Higgins does not guide Eliza the way how to enunciate vowels but wholly neglects her untill her correct pronunciation.
The housekeeper: “…When will it stop?”
Henry Higgins: “When she does it properly, of course.
Is that all, Mrs. Pearce?”
The result is that Eliza is frastrated. She can not produce the sound in the right way.
Turning to the second method, Higgins puts six marbles in Eliza’s mouth to make her say the sentence “With blackest moss, the flower pots were thickly crusted, one and all.” clearly “as a bell”. Because he supposes that Demosthenes practised with pebbles and became a public speaking expert, thereby, this method is necessary for Eliza.
“If they were necessary for Demosthenes they are necessary for Eliza Doolittle.”
However, Eliza, once again, can not do it.
From two methods above, it can be infered that when learning phonetics and phonology, the learner can have various methods to enhance his pronunciation. One