Pronunciation is an area of great difficulty for the untrained EFL teacher. But, with a little training and practice, you can facilitate the improvement of your student's pronunciation almost as well as the seasoned professional. For our purposes here, "pronunciation" will include the instruction of stress, rhythm and intonation.
Everyone is familiar with the old jokes about Asian students ordering "Flied Lice" and, in fact, such pronunciation problems persist today. So let’s help our students solve them.
To a large extent, EFL students have problems with pronunciation and stress primarily due to that fact that their native tongue may not have that particular sound (their native grammar may even prohibit making that sound) and the absence in many languages of "consonant clusters" (strings of consonants).
When studying and teaching pronunciation, you will need to learn to use a respelling system to help students get the feel of the language.
Some people advocate the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) but a problem with that system is that few students know it and you will spend an inordinate amount of time teaching it to them only to have them move on to another teacher who doesn't use it.
Additionally, there are at least ten other major and well known phonetic systems that appear in dictionaries and pronunciation and listening books around the world.
A simple system is used in the listening book: ‘Sound Advice’ and in the pronunciation book ‘Sound Advantage’, both authored by Stacy A. Hagen. You will see a similar system used below. A simple system that is intuitive and easy to use is critical to your success in helping your students succeed in speaking in a comprehensible way.
EFL teachers are all too familiar with students that approach them and speak clear complete sentences of something that is not even remotely understandable.
A student may have a good understanding of English and an excellent vocabulary but if their pronunciation is so poor that they cannot communicate, all is lost.
Students need to hear natural fast relaxed pronunciation as we speak it every day, not a carefully over-articulated overly pronounced one-word-by-one-word phrasing of sentences.
Speaking too slowly and too emphatically is a common characteristic of the untrained teacher.
Speaking unnaturally hurts your students for two reasons. First, they will imitate your speaking style and they too will speak unnaturally, and second, they will not recognize and understand natural rapid speech when they hear it.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't slow your speech down a bit to help your students get some basic ideas but it does mean that you should speak naturally most of the time. It also means that you need to teach them what natural speech sounds like. There is some evidence that says that if students don't speak naturally, they won't recognize normal speech when they hear it.
Consider the following:
My name is Fred really sounds like: Mi naeh miz Fred.
How much is it? really sounds like: How muh chi zit?
The idea of the end of one word connecting to the beginning of the next word is called "linking" or “liaisons” [depending on who wrote the pronunciation book].
If you habitually speak slowly and over-enunciate, your students will listen for How much is it? and won't understand when they hear the normal speech sounds of How muh chi zit?
The skilled EFL teacher instructs her students in these differences, how to pronounce them, and how to listen for them.
Consider: Sue wants to get a better water heater
Say it quickly, several times, in normal speech and see what it really sounds like.
It will sound more like: Sue wuhnstuh gettuh bedder wadder heeder.
The idea of words sticking together and some sounds becoming smaller is called "reduction".
There is, of course, some variation by country and region in how we speak. Learn to use respelling to help your students get it right.
It is important that you understand this concept. Untrained teachers will say, "I don't speak like that!" But they do - you do - everyone does. You just aren’t used to listening for it.
Do your students a favor and start listening to how people really speak.
What about Respelling?
Should you memorize and use the International Phonetic Alphabet? No, your students won't usually know it. Look in a variety of books and adopt a simple method similar to the one used above.
Will your students confuse respelling with the correct spelling of words?
No, not if you just tell them, "It sounds like this" while pointing at the respelling. Students "get it."
Must you respell absolutely correctly?
No, but be as accurate as you can. The way you respell will be different from someone else as we all have some minor variations in our pronunciation.
Word and Sentence Stress
Add to respelling, the notion of word and sentence stress. Many EFL students around the world will have different stress patterns in their language.
When you pronounce words with two or more syllables, one syllable will be stressed more than the others. Until you practice a bit, you may have trouble hearing stress because it is such a natural part of a native-speaker's speech.
Here is what to listen for: Tone, length of time, loudness.
For example: Banana - sounds like buh NAEH nuh If you listen carefully, the middle syllable has a slightly higher tone, lasts a bit longer and is slightly louder.
Thai students, for example, will say: buh naeh NUH
Because of the different pronunciation rules in Thai, they will tend to stress and raise the tone of the last syllable.
Sentences will have stress patterns that students need to learn and respelling can help them with that also.
Some words are not so important to hear and are reduced in time, loudness and tone. Some words are more important, louder and longer and have a higher tone.
The important words are called "content words". They are nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Less important words are called "function words" and are pronouns, helping verbs, conjunctions and prepositions. These rules are not always true but are good general guidelines.
Example: My name is Bob when written showing sentence stress sounds/looks more like: my NAME is BOB.
Don't overdo word and sentence stress. It is important to speak naturally when teaching your students stress. After all, you want your students to speak naturally too.
Word and sentence stress takes a lot of practice. But the practice is worthwhile as your students will benefit greatly from your efforts. Don't worry about getting it slightly wrong. It is more important that you just try it and work with it and develop your skills with it. It will make you a much better teacher in the long run.
Here is a simple activity for teaching/practicing pronunciation.
Get your students to sit back to back in pairs. Ask them to say one of the following words. The other student has to listen carefully and decide which column the word comes from.
Sound1 Sound2
Sea She
Sue Shoe
Sip Ship
Ass Ash
You can use pictures or flashcards to help your students.
Another good method to teach pronunciation is called block building. This is when you start by using two letter words with the class. Every week or lesson you can build on it by using three letter words and so on. This is a very common and successful way of teaching pronunciation in an ESL class.
Note: Think about sentence stress a bit like this. When you talk on a mobile or cell phone, you often don't hear every word and you don't need to.
You get the "gist" of the sentence from hearing the important words. Those are the words that are stressed in a sentence. Those are the “function words”.
There is a lot to study here as there is a lot to learn.
The suggested readings are ranked in the order of difficulty and the order in which they are best read.
Links to Important Readings on Pronunciation:
Word Stress
http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/word-stress.htm
Sentence Stress
http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/sentencestress.htm
More on Linking
http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/linking.htm
Kent University Phonetics Resource Page
http://literacy.kent.edu/Midwest/Materials/ndakota/soup/
Kent University’s website may sometimes be offline. If so, check back the next day and it will usually be back online. It is worth the effort to check again as their site is loaded with good material.
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