Teaching Pronunciation

Pronunciation involves far more than individual sounds. Word stress, sentence stress, intonation, and word linking all influence the sound of spoken English, not to mention the way we often slur words and phrases together in casual speech. 'What are you going to do?' becomes 'Whaddaya gonna do?' English pronunciation involves too many complexities for learners to strive for a complete elimination of accent, but improving pronunciation will boost self esteem, facilitate communication, and possibly lead to a better job or a least more respect in the workplace. Effective communication is of greatest importance, so choose first to work on problems that significantly hinder communication and let the rest go. Remember that your students also need to learn strategies for dealing with misunderstandings, since native pronunciation is for most an unrealistic goal.


General Principles in Teaching Pronunciation

1. In a pronunciation lesson it is a good idea to get students listening before they speak.
2. Teachers need to model pronunciation features clearly before they ask students to repeat.
3. It helps students if you provide a white board model of the features that you have practiced.
4. Sometimes it is a good idea to get learners to analyze the pronunciation of an utterance in pairs.
5. Having heard or analyzed a pronunciation feature, students need plenty of oral practice.
6. Teachers need to give students plenty of feedback on their pronunciation.

Some Techniques in Teaching Pronunciation

1. Exercise should be simple, accessible , fun and combine reception and production.
2. Some students do feel embarrassed to pull ridiculous faces when practicing vowel sounds, but have generally found that this soon passes and students enjoy the pronunciation work.
3. Where possible, exercises should be communicative in that they should (and do generate differences of opinion and disagreement about what was said/heard.

Some Strategies in Teaching Pronunciation

Teachers of English pronunciation should remember to keep lessons short, fun, and interactive. They should be somewhat repetitive in nature so students can have frequent exposure to hearing and speaking the same sounds until they are comfortable with them. Frequent testing and evaluation is important to help students learn their problem areas.

Classroom activities

a. Students read and listen to a short excerpt and mark features of connected speech on the audio script.
b. After a freer communication activity the teacher notes pronunciation problems on the white board for students to correct.
c. The teacher does a 20-minute warmer activity that focuses on the difference between two sounds
d. The teacher uses prompts to elicit, model and drill the target structure.
e. Students listen to, analyze and do a variety of practice activities, focusing on different intonation patterns.

Features of Pronunciation Activities

1. sounds
2. word stress
3. utterance or sentence stress
4. connected speech
5. intonation