Phonetic Teachers and the Reform Movement: evidence from records of the IPA

ABSTRACT

This work attempts to discover something about the hundreds of relatively obscure language teachers around the world who put Reform Movement principles to work in their teaching. We use the surviving records of the teachers’ memberships in the International Phonetic Association (IPA). At its foundation and for many years afterwards the IPA was primarily an association for language teachers, and the detailed membership lists which were regularly published in the Association’s journal provide a historical resource of great value, especially when used in conjunction with a recently-produced index which facilitates rapid searching. An exploratory study which focuses on early members in Australasia reveals several forgotten figures who can be traced in other records and archives. The conclusion outlines the eventual transformation of the IPA’s guiding principles and enquires into the effective lifespan of Reform Movement influence within the Association.

KEYWORDS:

• Phonetics
• IPA
• International Phonetic Association
• Australia
• New Zealand
• Paul Passy
• Reform Movement
• modern language teaching

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Paul Carley for providing details of bound volumes of Le Maître Phonétique in his personal collection for comparison with the three sets at our disposal. We are also grateful to the editors and to an anonymous reviewer for detailed comments and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Of the 16 Reform Movement authors whose works are anthologised in the five volumes of Howatt and Smith (2002), only three do not appear in the membership record of the IPA. They are Hermann Breymann, Leopold Bahlsen and W. Stuart MacGowan. A fourth, Felix Franke (1860–1886), did not live long enough to be included in any of the published membership lists, though he had been a member of the Phonetic Teacher’s Association. His early death in 1886 is reported in the first number of the Association’s journal that same year (Passy 1886b).

² For simplicity we disregard minor changes in the successive names of the organisation and use English forms of the names. In various places we have without comment translated unproblematic material into English and/or replaced phonetically-transcribed material with conventional orthography.

³ The first twelve issues of The Phonetic Teacher (May 1886–April 1887) each consist of a single sheet, folded to give four pages 265 mm x 210 mm. The title appears as a banner at the head of the first page, in the manner of a newspaper. The pages do not carry printed numbers. For this reason the pages in each issue are referred to as 1–4 (i.e. not cumulatively through the year). In the reprint issued by Swets and Zeitlinger N.V. (Amsterdam) in 1969 the early issues were photographically reduced to match the page size adopted by the journal from May 1887.

⁴ Surprisingly, other than a brief footnote (1899b: 21), the work contains no treatment of phonetics.

⁵ The digitised version of the relevant issues of Le Maitre Phonetique available via JSTOR was scanned from a reprint of the journal issued in 1969 by Swets and Zeitlinger, which in turn was evidently prepared from a library copy of the journal which lacked the covers.

⁶ Governesses in Australia at this period may be divided into two categories: (i) those employed on the European model by wealthy middle-class families in larger cities, and (ii) those in remote locations who provided the only source of basic education for isolated families. It would seem that the first of these is most likely to have included women with an informed interest in pedagogical methods. The second category still exists to an extent today (Newman 2014).

⁷ One notable exception is John McConnell Black (1855–1951). He joined the IPA in 1898 and continued to be listed until 1931. Having worked as a journalist, he later enjoyed private means from a legacy and was principally notable as a botanist and botanical artist. But he was also active in recording indigenous culture. In 1899 he published in Le Maître Phonétique a short paper on the language Ngarrindjeri (Black 1899). In their linguistic bibliography of aboriginal Australia, Carrington and Triffitt (1999) list several other papers by Black on South Australian languages, which reportedly also make use of IPA notation (though Carrington and Triffitt miss this 1899 piece). But Black’s interests extended to many other languages too. According to Robertson (1979) he was ‘a capable linguist and frequently used Arabic, French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish (as well as shorthand) in his notebooks and diaries’.

As far as we can tell, other early IPA members in Australia largely neglected indigenous languages, and we have found no evidence either of them turning their attention to the phonetics of the community languages around them, which were already becoming numerous (Clyne 1991). Universities – and indeed education in all contexts – looked chiefly to European models (Rickard 2017: 128), and the focus was on teaching the major European languages of culture, particularly French and German.

⁸ The Senior Public Examination was a secondary school examination set and marked by a university in the relevant Australian state, which effectively defined the secondary school course. The first such examinations, administered by the University of Sydney, had been introduced for New South Wales in 1867 (see “Examinations” 2019).

⁹ Nicholson (1909) is favourably reviewed in the same issue of Le Maître Phonétique (Tuttle 1910) and just a few pages ahead of Nicholson’s note to Passy.

¹⁰ A thoughtful attempt to balance the advantages and disadvantages of phonetics to the language teacher of the day is given by Bahlsen (1905: 39–46).

¹¹ The most recent examination was held in London in September 2019. The current Examinations Secretary is Patricia Ashby.

¹² As with the membership lists, schools figure in the addresses of candidates – here, in addition to the self-evident Hoe Grammar School (it was in Plymouth, UK) and Sydney Church of England Grammar School, it should be noted that ‘Christ’s Hospital’ refers to a prestigious private school in the south of England, founded in 1552.

¹³ Her name is shown as ‘Gillam’ in the membership records, but ‘Gillan’ here. The two name variants are linked with the same address. Notice that the list of French results also has the two spellings ‘Sidney’ and ‘Sydney’ (for the Australian city).

¹⁴ Until 1962, New Zealand had a single federal national university, of which the University of Otago and Canterbury College were early constituents (see “Short History of New Zealand Universities”, n.d.).

¹⁵ See “Secondary Schools” (1905, IV: 158). The same source tells us that Blunt was born in 1867.

¹⁶ The Statutes of 1930 seem to have been circulated in the journal as a loose insert of four unnumbered pages, which like the journal covers is likely to be missing from bound library copies. The six pedagogical principles are present the 1930 insert, though on the third page and no longer shown as part of the Statutes proper. The six principles are missing from the 1945 revision of the Statutes which is included in IPA (1949).

¹⁷ The translation is that used by the IPA (1984: 54) itself.

¹⁸ We retain the rendering ‘Pupil’s Section’ used by Windsor Lewis (2005). Windsor Lewis also cites various reasons for the decline of this section.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Ashby

Michael Ashby is Honorary Associate Professor in the research department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences at University College London (UCL) and President of the International Phonetic Association for 2019–2023. After graduating from Oxford, he trained in phonetics and linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and then at UCL, where he subsequently taught for 35 years. He has lectured on phonetics across the world from Chile to Japan. His publications include a widely-used textbook, Introducing phonetic science (2005), written jointly with John Maidment. He was Phonetics Editor of five successive editions of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary from 1995 to 2015. His current main research field is in the history of phonetics.

Patricia Ashby

Patricia Ashby is an Emeritus Fellow to the University of Westminster (having taught there for over 30 years) and a National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. The author of two successful textbooks—Speech Sounds (1995 and 2005), and Understanding Phonetics (2011)—she has taught phonetics all over the world, including Belgium, Germany, India, Poland, Spain and Japan, and in the UK at the universities of Reading, Oxford and UCL. She holds a PhD from UCL, and her main research interests now lie in the areas of English intonation, and the history of phonetics. She has served on the Council of the International Phonetic Association since 2011, and is currently the IPA’s Examinations Secretary.