Pronunciation

What and why?

Correct and clear pronunciation is obviously of considerable importance in language learning. Without it, students may not be understood and may be poorly perceived by other English speakers. However, good pronunciation is something which takes time to build up as there are many factors involved. Students need to hear a lot of English before they can develop a 'feel' for the sounds of English. They need to have confidence in their abilities, not feel shy and be ready to make a fool of themselves as they try to get their tongues round the different sounds. Pronunciation is thus probably best dealt with a little at a time and in the context of learning new words, structures, etc. rather than in isolation.

Practical ideas

• In the Listening and Speaking Pack there are Say it clearly! exercises which focus on pronunciation work.
• It is better to spend very short periods running through pronunciation examples and exercises rather than one long session. Perhaps the same pronunciation exercise could be done in three or four different lessons for three minutes at a time.
• It is worth discovering which are the main pronunciation problems for students of your MOTHER TONGUE. You can then spend a little time focusing on them. A little pronunciation practice goes a long way!
• Students may find stress and intonation practice easier and more interesting to respond to by doing some jazz chants or clapping as the words are stressed on the cassette. This can be done in a small group if they have the cassette recorder or briefly with all the students together.
• Students can be encouraged to do pronunciation work at home. If you go through the Say it clearly! exercises with the students, you can ask them to practise again at home.
• READING aloud is a technique which is often used to check pronunciation. In our experience, however, reading aloud has very little effect in improving pronunciation. In the classroom, students typically make more mistakes when they read aloud than they do normally. It also wastes time for the students who have to listen and places the teacher in the role of having to correct the reader all the time. Turning the written word into sounds is quite a separate process from the production of a word in normal conversation.

Researching the classroom

• Personality and background can have a lot of influence on the way students see themselves as 'English speakers'. This will influence their pronunciation. Try to identify which of your students have the clearest pronunciation in English. Can you explain this in terms of their background or their personality? Do they have certain things in common? Are they, for example, quiet students or more extrovert? Have they travelled to English-speaking countries? Are they musical?
• Some pronunciation problems may originate in the difference between sounds in the MOTHER TONGUE and sounds in English. Is this true with your students? Can you identify which sounds these are? Try an experiment. Identify two sounds which you know are very different in English from the mother tongue or which don't exist in the students' mother tongue. Give the students explicit practice in one of the sounds but do not pay any special attention to the other sound. After a few weeks, judge how well the students use each sound. Does explicit pronunciation practice always make a difference?