The Hows
and Whys of Teaching Pronunciation
Teaching English
pronunciation is an area of language teaching that many English teachers avoid.
While there are many textbooks and instruction manuals available, as well as
books on the theories and methodologies of language teaching there is
comparatively little on learning pronunciation.
Why? Is it because we
don't need to teach pronunciation or because it cannot be taught?
Certainly, we need to
teach pronunciation. There is a big difference between a ship and a sheep and a
pear and a bear! When teaching any language as a foreign or second language,
our first goal for our students is basic communication, and that can't happen
if no one can understand what they are saying.
How NOT to Teach
Pronunciation
When teachers decide to
focus on pronunciation practise many of them make the mistake of trying to
teach pronunciation along with introducing vocabulary. This can work with
students who have a "good ear," or who perhaps speak a related
language. However it can be hit and miss with students whose mother tongue has
no relation to the target language.
This brings us back to
the question of whether pronunciation can be effectively taught at all? The
answer is yes, of course it can be taught, it's just that the way many
textbooks tell us to teach it is actually one of the least effective.
Most textbooks will have
you drill pronunciation with repetition of the vocabulary. Some of the better
ones will have you work on it with spelling, which is an important skill,
especially in English with its many irregularities and exceptions. Very few
will start you and your students where you need to start, however, and that is
at the level of the phoneme.
Start with Phonemes (but
not necessarily phonetic script)
The dictionary defines
"phoneme" as "any of the perceptually distinct units of sound in
a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b,
d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat." This definition
highlights one of the key reasons that we must, as language teachers, start our
pronunciation instruction at the level of the phoneme. If a phoneme is a
"perceptually distinct unit of sound" then we have to realize that
before students can consistently produce a given phoneme, they must be able to
hear it. Thus the first lessons in pronunciation should involve your students
listening and identifying, rather than speaking.
Introduce your phonemes
in contrasting pairs like /t/ and /d/. Repeat the phonemes in words as well as
in isolation and ask the students to identify them. In order to visually
represent the differences they are listening for, you may want to draw
pronunciation diagrams for each sound showing the placement of the tongue and
lips.
You might also consider
teaching your students the necessary symbols from the phonetic alphabet,
because although T and D are written differently in English, the TH in
"there" and the TH in "thanks" are written exactly the
same, despite the difference in pronunciation. This isn't essential, and really
works best with adults rather than children, but it is worth it for any
students who are highly visual or analytical learners.
You can play all sorts of
matching games with this material to make the drills more fun and less
stressful. You can have students play with nonsense sounds and focus on the
tiny differences between contrasted phonemic pairs, the key being to get them
to hear the phoneme.
From Recognition of
Phonemes to Practise
Once they can hear and
identify a phoneme, it's time to practice accurate production of the sound. For
this, pronunciation diagrams are useful. Your students need to be able to see
where to put their lips and tongues in relation to their teeth. Most sounds are
articulated inside your mouth and students have no idea what you are doing in
order to produce that particular noise. If you have ever tried to teach a
Japanese student how to say an American /r/, then you have experienced the
frustration of trying to get a student to produce tongue movements they can't
see. There are books out there with diagrams, and with a little practice you
can probably produce sketches of them yourself. If you can't, get hold of a
good reference book so that you can flip to the relevant pages. Your students
will thank you for this insight into the mouth, especially since there is no
danger of the embarrassment of bad breath with a drawing.
While this may sound time
consuming and unnatural, you have to realize that you are in the process of
reprogramming you students' brains, and it is going to take a while. New neural
pathways have to be created to learn new facial movements and link them with
meaning.
In the classroom, we are
recreating an accelerated version of the infant's language learning experience.
We are providing examples and stimulus through grammar and vocabulary lessons,
but with pronunciation lessons we are also breaking down language to the point
of babbling noises so that our students can play with the sounds, as infants
do, and learn to distinguish meaningful sounds on an intuitive level while
making use of more mature analytical skills that an infant doesn't have.
If you regularly take ten
minutes of your lesson to do this kind of focused phonemic practice, your
students articulation and perception of phonemes will see improvement after
several weeks, and you will get them all to the point where you can practice
pronunciation on a word or even a sentential level.
Moving on to
Pronunciation of Words
The progress will be more
pronounced with younger students, but even adults will begin to give up
fossilized pronunciation errors when reciting vocabulary words in isolation.
It's time to make the next leap – correct pronunciation in the context of natural
conversation. Make no mistake; this is a leap, not because it is more
physically challenging, but because you are about to address a completely
different set of barriers.
When we teach on the
phonemic level, we are struggling to expand physical and neurological
limitations. We are taking irrelevant noises and making them significant to our
students, while trying to teach them a greater range of articulation with their
mouths, tongues, and lips. But when we work on pronunciation at a lexical or
sentential level, we are dealing with complex emotional, psychological, and
cultural motivations that require their own kind of re-education.
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