Teaching Pronunciation

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Chapter 2

• Teaching Pronunciation

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I why teach pronunciation?

• 1. Inaccurate production of a phoneme or
  inaccurate use of suprasegmental elements such
  as stress or intonation can cause reception or
  comprehension of the meaning or the function of
  an utterance to a native speaker or even a
  speaker from another language community.

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• 2. Pronunciation can affect the perceived tone
  or mood of an utterance.
• 3. Not all pronunciation difficulties
  necessarily get in the way of communication,
  students often like to have their pronunciation
  mistakes brought to their attention.

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I I Problems and approaches in pronunciation
teaching

• 1. A paradox pronunciation teaching tends to be
  neglected and when it is not neglected, it tends
  to be reactive.
• 2. From reactive to planned teaching
  integrated, remedial and practice lessons
• (1) Pronunciation teaching as well as
  grammar teaching should be planned too instead
  of being done in response to students errors in
  the classroom.

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• (2) Integrating pronunciation teaching fully
  with the study of grammatical and lexical
  features benefit students in successful
  communication.

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• 3. what pronunciation model to teach (the
  pronunciation characteristics of the language a
  teacher presents to learners in the classroom)
• (1)Received Pronunciation (RP) The Queens
  English or BBC English as signifying status and
  education

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• (2) Issues of production and reception To enable
  students to understand a wide range of accents
  and varieties of English and also to allow them
  to choose their own target model so long as it is
  widely comprehensible

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• 4. techniques and activities teaching of
  receptive and productive skills
• (1) drilling
• (a) definition the teacher says a word or
  structure and gets the class to repeat it
• (b) purposes to help students achieve better
  pronunciation of language items and to help them
  remember new items

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• (c) eliciting ( prompts, pictures, mime to
  encourage students to bring up a previously
  studied word, phrase or structure)-gt choral
  drilling-gt individual drilling
• (d) chaining back chain, front chain, open pair
  drilling, substitution drilling

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• (2) minimal pairs and related activities
• (a) definition words or utterances which differ
  by only one phoneme
• (b) aim to focus on sounds which have been
  causing difficulties for students
• (c) in a monolingual class the teacher can
  practice sounds that are likely to cause problems
  but would do better to concentrate on sound that
  actually do.

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• (d) in a multilingual class the same as that
  applied to a monolingual class but multilingual
  peer teaching for bigger problems
• e.g. 1. Students can be given lists of words
  and work with a partner to decide which words
  have a particular sound (to introduce phonemic
  symbols)
• e.g. 2. Students might also listen to a
  succession of words and, decide how many times a
  particular sound is heard

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• e.g. 3 Sounds can also be contrasted by
  appearing in close proximity. The teacher can
  drill these utterances chorally and individually
• e.g. 4. In a similar vein, but moving slightly
  away from the idea of minimal pairs, teachers can
  also ask students to listen for the odd one out
  among a list of words that they are given

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• (3) Pronunciation and spelling activities
• (4) taping students English
• (5) Listening activities
• (6) Reading activities