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Teaching pronunciation

In the following lesson excerpt (for teenage and adult students at intermediate level or above), we tell the students they are going to hear conversations in which a woman asks a man to do something, and the man replies by saying things like 'Well...' or 'I'd rather not' or 'That depends on what it is' (if the woman says something general like 'Could you give me a hand?').

Students listen to an audio track in which the woman asks (for example) 'Could you give me a hand with hanging out the washing?' and the man says 'Well...'. All the students have to do is decide whether or not the man is going to help, and the only clue they have to this is the intonation he uses and the pitch of his voice. After each exchange, we pause the audio track and the students discuss whether the man sounded as if he was saying 'Definitely no', 'Maybe' or 'All right, I suppose so'. The class discuss and analyse the different intonation patterns the man uses.

Later, students can ask us to do things and we can answer using different intonation patterns so that the students have to work out which of the three answers it is. Students then ask each other to do things and, using the phrases 'Well...', 'That depends on what it is', etc, the answering students have to indicate (using intonation) what their answer means.

We can teach intonation (and stress) in many other ways, too:

Punctuation: one activity is to show pre-intermediate students a range of unpunctuated phrases such as 'You bought a lottery ticket', 'You don't like my hat' or 'You want a pizza'. The teacher plays an audio track (or says the phrases out loud), and the students have to decide whether they should put a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark at the end of them depending on what they have heard. Students can then practise saying the phrases in the three different ways (statement, question, exclamation).

Same sentence, different situations: a variation on these activities is to get students to think about how they would say the same sentence in different situations. For example, we can ask them to say, 'Good morning, Mr Jones' as if (a) they've never met him before, (b) he owes them money, (c) they really like him but don't want to be too obvious, etc.

We can practise stress in words by modelling the words and exaggerating the stressed syllable (e.g the second syllable of 'comPUTer' or the third syllable of 'impoSITion') and maybe beating time with our hands. We can give students a list of three- and four-syllable words which they have to put in different boxes depending on whether the stress comes on the first, second or third syllable (as in the example below):

Put the following words in the correct columns:

accompanist audience audition composer conductor double bass interview manager percussion photographer receptionist remember saxophone songwriter therapist violi

Perhaps we can write the words on cards which students have to stick up on a board in the appropriate column. Or they could drag-and-drop words into the columns on a computer screen or interactive whiteboard.

There are many other ways of teaching stress and rhythm - the following are just two examples.

Stress in phrases: for stress in phrases, we can, for example, show intermediate students a range of phrases such as 'Come at ten', 'I lost my voice', 'Sing your song', 'The weather's awful', 'This can't go on', 'You must be joking'. The phrases can be written on individual cards. Each student has one of the cards and they have to find their 'stress pair' (the student who has a card which has a phrase with the same stress pattern as the one they are holding). 'Come at ten' is matched with 'Sing your song'; T lost my voice' is paired with 'This can't go on'; 'You must be joking' is paired with 'The weather's awful'.

Songs and chants: songs and chants are good for rhythm, and for young children, especially, they make the business of stress easy and uncomplicated since it doesn't even have to be explained. Songs like 'The wheels on the bus' have a strong rhythmic pattern which, through constant repetition, become part of the child's rhythmic sense:

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round.

The wheels on the bus go round and round, all through the town.

The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish; swish, swish, swish; swish, swish, swish.

The wipers on the bus go swish, swish, swish all through the town.

(There are further verses about the horn on the bus - beep, beep, beep; the mums on the bus - chatter, chatter, chatter; the dads on the bus - snore, snore, snore, etc).

Some teachers use jazz chants for rhythm. Words are spoken rhythmically to the accompaniment of clapping and stamping. Imagine, for example, putting a beat to the following lines:

I dropped into my neighbourhood and what did I see

A hundred happy faces smiling up at me.

etc

When we teach sounds, we want students not only to speak correctly, but also to recognise sound and spelling correspondence. We also want them to be able to discriminate between similar-sounding phonemes. We can, for example, do minimal pair exercises (minimal pairs are pairs of words such as 'ship' and 'sheep', 'hat' and 'hut', 'sin' and 'sing', 'wash' and 'watch', which are differentiated by only one sound - the other sounds stay the same). Students can be given pairs of words, e.g.

ship sheep

heart hard

For each number, they hear a sentence and they have to circle the word they hear in each case. (For example, 1 'Yesterday I saw a large sheep in the field', 2 'Being in love is so hard'). We can then model the words. In the case of the vowels, we will make sure the students take note of the lip position for 'ship' (spread loosely) and 'sheep' (stretched). With the two consonants, they need to know that whereas /t/ (e.g. 'two', 'touch', 'heart') is said with the vocal chords open, /d/ (e.g. 'do', 'hard') is said with the vocal chords closed. The result is that /d/ is a voiced consonant (because the air vibrates as it passes though the closed chords) whereas /t/ is voiceless because there is no such constriction (see page 62). Students then say the words and their classmates have to decide which sound they were using.

Minimal pair exercises like this can be used with any age and, depending on what particular words, sentences and phrases are used, at any level. Once again, drawings and cards will help young children, just as getting them to stand in different groups depending on the sounds in words which they have written on cards may help the more kinaesthetic learners (see page 16).

Sounds and spelling: a major cause of difficulty for some students of English is 'V the apparent lack of correspondence between sounds and spelling. The following procedures show ways of dealing with this. In the first, we give students lists of words with a certain spelling (e.g. the letter combination 'ou' in 'rough', 'tough', 'ought', 'bought', 'though', 'through', etc). They have to group the words according to the different ways 'ou' is pronounced. A second idea is to give students a list of

words (e.g. 'won', 'summer', 'son', 'plunge', 'under', etc) and ask them to say which sound (in this case /л/) occurs in all of them, before getting them to repeat the words and then think of others which contain the same sound.

Tongue twisters: we can design rhymes and tongue twisters which use a particular 'V sound or sounds and have students repeat them - for example, 'George judges

jewels jealously' for the sound /&?,/, or 'awful orphans ought to organise' for the

sound h\l (at least in many varieties of British English).

The most important thing to remember about pronunciation teaching is that students should have as much opportunity as possible to listen to spoken English. When teaching different sounds, we will try to help them hear the difference between confusing phonemes. When teaching stress and intonation, we will ask them to recognise what different intonation patterns mean (e.g. enthusiasm, lack of enthusiasm); we will model words and phrases indicating appropriate stress and intonation (using hand and arm movements and vocal exaggeration, perhaps) and get students to try to imitate us. A lot of this occurs naturally when we are teaching grammar or vocabulary. It is important to remember that when we write new language on the board, we should indicate where the word or phrase is stressed, using one of the methods we saw on page 62.

Question: Give an example of a genuine communicative activity: speak on the aim and objectives; describe the procedure; explain the type of feedback you will suggest; describe evaluation and assessment tools.

Genuine communication in the classroom is the most vital component of an EFL course, regardless of factors like type and length of course or the students’ level.

In a way, achieving genuine classroom communication is not as difficult as it may seem. However, it requires skill and preparation. The first step is for the teacher to create a friendly and supportive atmosphere that encourages natural communication and make students feel at ease. To do this, the teacher needs to be genuinely interested in the students, their lives outside the classroom, and their needs in the classroom. That’s why it’s always beneficial to get to know your students and establish a professional, yet friendly working relationship. A good starting point is setting up “get to know everyone” games and activities at the beginning of the course where the students learn about each other, each other’s interests and preferences, as well as get to know the teacher.

Creating a friendly environment is always a good start. However, it’s not enough. Even in the friendliest of environments natural communication can die if the teacher can’t manage the classroom and doesn’t provide a wide enough range of communication-stimulating activities.

Seating is an important aspect of classroom management that can boost natural communication and thus improve the whole learning process. There are a few important points that the teacher should consider when arranging seating in the classroom, mainly group size, level, and whether it’s a multinational class or not. Typically, it’s easier to manage smaller groups of students who are roughly at the same level. When a teacher is fortunate to have a class of 10 or fewer students, it’s possible to use all types of seating arrangements. However, in some countries classes can be quite large, which makes seating arrangements such as pairs difficult to monitor and control.

In a multi-national classroom, it’s essential to avoid grouping people of the same nationality together. When all pairs or groups are mixed, the students will have to communicate in English and find ways of saying what they want to say even if they are not 100% sure of their grammar.

Even though seating is an important part of creating successful learning environment, the most efficient way of ensuring genuine classroom communication is providing a wide range of carefully planned classroom activities designed to engage each and every student.

A good starting point is ensuring that all materials and activities are designed to create a VAK (visual-auditory-kinaesthetic) presentation. In other words, it’s important to make sure that there are appropriate texts and visual aids, audio and video materials, and suitable games and activities for every lesson. All materials and activities selected for a particular lesson should complement each other.

It’s quite easy to combine all types of activities. For example, an activity using a set of flash cards when learning body parts and appearance can be combined with a game when students are asked to raise their arms, touch their nose, etc. This can be followed by a listening exercise that requires the students to jot down some information about the people described in the exercise.

Another very important part of achieving genuine communication in the classroom is making sure that less advanced or shy students don’t get disadvantaged or even ignored.

There are several techniques that can help encourage less confident students to take part in a discussion. One of them is pairing a less confident student with a more advanced student, so that he or she can receive some peer advice and help. This can also help the more advanced student discover more about the language and the way it works.

Asking questions is another way to engage the whole class. This can be achieved by asking questions that can’t be answered by a simple “yes” or “no”, always asking random people so that the whole group stays engaged, and discussing things that interest the students.

With non-beginner classes, role plays are a good way to engage everyone and prompt the less confident students to communicate with the rest of the group. In the case of a big enough level gap, it’s good to give the less advanced student some keywords that he or she could use. At a later stage, the student should be encouraged to communicate without the help of keywords and thus develop his or her speaking skills.

All of the above-mentioned techniques will help to improve genuine communication in the classroom. However, the most important of them all is carefully planning lessons so that they include exercises that naturally lead to communicative activities. This will help to maximize the students’ confidence level and prompt them to communicate more actively and freely.

How to Achieve Genuine Communication in the ESL Classroom

To achieve genuine communication in the ESL Classroom, whether it be younger people or adults, it is a good idea to make use of the "communicative" teaching method and to employ the four senses for learning; speak, listen, write and see. Don't stick to just the textbook. Asking children to listen and repeat, or read and memorize, won't make way for genuine communication or learning. Classroom learning should be a discussion, not a lecture by the teacher. Communication needs to be real-life circumstances, allowing them to learn how they would communicate if they lived in that country.

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