Teaching Pronunciation

    Do you ever get students come to you and say: “I went to an English-speaking country last summer and nobody could understand me!”? At first, you might seem to ponder the reason (or reasons) why this had happened, but then another factor flashes up in your brain as a light bulb that lights up all of a sudden when you replay the student’s sentence in your head and some of its words sound like “/esPIkin/, “/noBOdi/” or “/koul(d)/”.

There. Three words. Three inoffensive words students shouldn’t apparently be struggling with when it comes to uttering them. However, there’s moments (lots of them to be honest) when students do struggle with pronunciation. It’s not just difficult words like “awkwardness” or “chivalrous”. There are dozens of words students aren’t getting right and that’s something that really matters and needs some of our attention.

 When I started teaching English some years ago, I was particularly keen on teaching everything there was in the book. I wanted to cover all points, speak about every single topic and do all the exercises in and off the units. I soon realized I didn’t have the time to do as much as I had planned to so I decided to cut pronunciation time off my lesson plan because a) I could teach pronunciation along the way, and b) because the coursebook I used didn’t have much to offer. Besides, students found pronunciation exercises extremely confusing and somehow irrelevant to the topic, so I decided not to teach them anymore eventually. But then something got me thinking and I just knew I was wrong. Even when most teachers I talked to about this shared my opinion, I knew it wasn’t a good idea not to teach pronunciation, so I decided on having a less tight lesson plan and include pronunciation in all my lessons. And this is what I learned:

       1. Make students familiar with the English sounds system from the very beginning. At first they might find it difficult with so many strange and unknown symbols, but once they learn them, it’s a piece of cake! Provide examples, teach them how to read words phonetically or just show them how pronunciation works in dictionaries. (You can also make use of the phonetic posters hanging on the walls!).

       2. Exposure to the target language is vital. I know that many people may disagree with this, but I think it’s good practice for students to listen to as much as they can and as many varieties as you can provide. Obviously, some accents will work better than others especially with lower levels, but the sooner students become familiar with different voices, the better.

       3. If you are not a hundred percent sure of how to pronounce a word, look it up! There’s some words like proper names which are not listed in dictionaries. However, you can find a good pronunciation of these words on the internet (YouTube, for example). If none of this works, ask the natives for help.

      4. And this is important too: you should be practising! It is not just the students who need it, we all need to practise to improve as well.

      5. Praise your students for good pronunciation and be kind to those who are having a hard time at pronouncing words correctly. I don’t like to “hypercorrect” my students, but I believe it is essential to correct those words that are constantly mispronounced (like “comfortable” or “since” in a Spanish scenario).

And now here’s some teaching ideas I’ve been using for quite a few years now that my students and I have genuinely enjoyed and that I believe you might find extremely useful.

Difficult Words Are Fun

As I mentioned before, most Spanish speakers find words like “comfortable” or “since” difficult to say. Very often words like “comfortable” are pronounced as /komfortEIbol/. What I did to correct them was to create a sentence that looks like a tongue twister using the keyword as many times as possible. The sentence reads like this:

“The uncomfortable comfort of this is uncomfortably comfortable”

I know, right? Not easy. But let me tell you it works. I write the sentence, I read it myself at a very slow pace and then ask the students to repeat it. I often change the dynamics by asking one or two students to read it out loud before the whole class does. To make it more fun, I play the role of an orchestra conductor so that it seems we’re a choir rehearsing for a show.

If you really want students to improve, don’t just ask them to repeat it once or twice and then move on. What I do is have them write the sentence and ask them to rehearse it at home (for homework) every day during a couple of weeks. Then, the day after that I’ll choose someone randomly and ask them to read the word out loud for me to check their progress.

Phonetics Competition

I do this game to teach phonetic symbols. I pre-teach the main and most difficult symbols and then give students two decks of cards (in different colours) that they have to read before they start the activity. Normally I do this in groups of 4. Students sit facing each other so that they can look at and listen to their partners clearly. I always tell my students how important it is to look at the speaker’s lips when learning pronunciation. The aim is to take it in turns and read the words off the cards without showing them. The words on the cards are phonetically transcribed, which makes the activity a little more challenging. When the other pair of students hears the word, they must write it down (the word they heard). When they’re all done, I show them the words and they check. The pair with the most correct words wins. At the end I always go through the words to double-check pronunciation with the class.

Other Ideas

Because pronunciation has become an essential part of my everyday teaching practice, I could devote a longer post to it, but I don’t want to be a complete bore. To finish this post, let me give you only a few more ideas that work. These ideas you may all know very well. Chinese Whispers is number one, which basically consists of whispering one sentence in a queue and expect the last person to get the same thing the first one did. Minimal Poetry is another idea which combines writing poetry and reading it with the practising of minimal pairs (or homophones). This works fine for boosting learners’ creativity and learning about rhythm. For more ideas, check this!

   As you can see, pronunciation is a big deal for me now and I hope it will be for you too. If you still have second thoughts on whether it really is important to teach it or not, have a look at this article. It’ll give you some good food for thought.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to share your ideas with me here!!!