French phonetics in New York

 The issue of teaching French phonetics has been a controversial topic in New York, it has become like that because a certain body of new Yorks teachers decided to vote for omission of phonetics question form the state examinations.  

Because such vote has transpired some may think that there’s a huge amount of these opposing bodies but it couldn’t be further from the truth as it’s only a small number of people violently opposed to teaching phonetics. The only thing this vote has actually shown is show what a determined minority can accomplish. The same minority attempted to oppose phonetics again in 1918 but failed to “put it across” because Mr. Whitley chief of the state examinators sent a questionnaire to the teachers all across the state. 

 There were 75 replies from the city of New York itself and 160 replies from teachers form the entire state. In New York city 40 of those were positive towards phonetics and 32 were opposed. Out of these 32, 10 were actually native French but have never studied phonetics and 13 were of different nationalities and have never studied phonetics Aswell which left only 9 teachers which had any knowledge of phonetics. In the whole of state, the results created an even bigger difference where 96 favoured phonetics and only 48 have been against them and 16 were doubtful, funnily enough out of these 48 a whole 31 have never studied phonetics leaving only 15 who had actual phonetics knowledge. 

In conclusion from we can gather from this information we can clearly tell that all this ordeal really was, a bad attempt at trying to fix something that did not need fixing by mostly people that had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. 

ref. Price, William R. “Phonetics in New York.” The Modern Language Journal, vol. 5, no. 6, 1921, pp. 348–349. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/313787. Accessed 8 June 2021.