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[ExpatLuke]

The school i recently taught at taught North American pronunciation. Of course you will teach whatever pronunciation is native to you. Vietnamese definitely need major help with pronunciation which is completely different than fluency. Anyone who has taught VN students immediately knows they leave off all the ending sounds of hard consonants. They also struggle with the TH and SH sounds. Consonant clusters are a nightmare. They rarely can tell the difference between a short i or long e sound.

All that said, I've largely stopped doing dedicated pronunciation activities and exercises in my lessons. I used to do 1 hour of focused pronunciation in a 3 hour class. But after the practice all the students would always go back to their wrong speaking habits they had formed. After 2 months of this i decided to just do natural speaking and focus on conversations. I corrected their mistakes as they were made and they starting forming the correct speaking habits much more quickly. I've pretty much given up on doing dedicated pronunciation activities in class now.

The only thing I would do pronunciation activities for again would be true beginners who haven't formed any bad habits yet.

[mk87]

[vabeckele]

[8balldeluxe]

The problem is unwillingness to believe the teacher. Students see the western arabic alphabet being used to mean totally different kinds of sounds than we use it for. They usually don't believe that final consonant or final -s or -ed is really necessary. I've heard it said that students improve pronunciation through listening, and it's not easy to do it consciously. When our institutions do not support us, and society instills skepticism about the foreign teacher with this second class mentality, they tend to think they can pick and choose from what we say. It is not until they can actually hear it for themselves that they decide how to speak . So that's why an input based method, without speaking exercises and without group tasks is best. Students can't really learn from each other's mistakes and in pair and group no one rises above the level of the highest learner's starting point.
That being said, you could construct a whole class from nothing but pronunciation and it still wouldn't matter. Students' language proficiency will ripen when they are ready. There's not much you as the teacher can do except provide more comprehensible input and answer questions.

[8balldeluxe]

[I'm With Stupid]

[Sashadroogie]

Sorry. I've lost the thread of this thread. Are we saying that the 90 min pron classes are effective or not? Wouldn't want to be out of sync with the latest phonological teaching trends...

[ajc19810]

Hi Vabeckele, it is so frustrating when this kind of stuff happens. It's no wonder there is a whole stream of teachers who just walk into a classrooms and expect their presence to be enough.

No materials and no knowledge of just how much work goes into our lesson prep and expecting you just to whip it up with probably little to no compensation. From your other posts i'm surprised you would even humor them.

I find learning and teaching pronunciation really boring and don't think i could stand a full 90 minute class of either. Especially when teachers ask you to teach 90 minutes of the small pronunciation exercises in books such as New English File.

There are a number of books at the local book shops which have complete pronunciation lessons weaved into games that suit Vietnamese learners.

[Demonietto]

[skarper]

Little and often is the oft quoted mantra for pronunciation work.

Makes sense due to the level of concentration needed to make it effective. A 90 minute class would be ineffective due to the amount of drifting in and out of focus the students and teacher would do.

These pronunciation courses are an attempt to get around the generally low skill of most teachers (NEST and non-NEST alike). They hive off all the pronunciation into a 90 minute specialist class taught by the most competent teacher they can find (at the rate of pay they will offer). Then all the other 'teachers' can just forget about this difficult area.....

I think you can do a 30-45 intensive pronunciation class and sometimes you need to in order to cover an important and quite large sub-system - but a lot of 5-15 minute activities are best to keep the students working on their pronunciation constantly.

My personal mantra is 'Every lesson is a pronunciation lesson!' Every topic/activity has a pronunciation aspect.

[ExpatLuke]

[SeldomSeen]

[ajc19810]

Ann Bakers stuff is what i was referring to regarding being applicable to the Vietnamese students style of learning.

While there is some debate about the usefulness of the phonetic alphabet, i have found it to be very helpful in my teaching. These types of books draw from that in a way that is entertaining and go beyond the usual boring and often not relevant tongue twister activities.

I think we need to remember that teachers on this board all have differing timetables with student contact. A teachers approach to teaching will be vastly different if they work for a mill and only get 45 mins with a class a week than if they work for "better school" and teach the whole course.

[skarper]

I don't think there is any debate about the usefulness of the IPA. It engenders fear in those unfamiliar but it only takes a bit of effort to learn it and use it.

This is perhaps the single most valuable but least taken up part of the CELTA.

It's not a panacea but it is an essential tool. It is even finding it's way into the books the kids use in schools recently.

[ExpatLuke]