Job Discussion Forums

[gregd75]

It seems to me that we really don't teach pronunciation and intonation these days. I know that i am guilty of thinking that maybe it's too difficult (for me to get my head round), so I'll just steer clear of pronunciation and more importantly intonation practice.

Do you do the same? Why is this?

In another thread we are talking about how salaries and teachers values haven't increased over the years- maybe we should re-evaluate what we're teaching!

Any student can arguably learn grammar and vocabulary from a book or off the internet, but pronunciation and intonation is a clear point of difference for us native speakers.

I'm going to be incorporating a lot more of it into my classes from now on. Maybe THIS is the future....?

[Tretyakovskii]

The "sounds of the English Language", in all its complexity, is indeed a challenge to teach if your students are already too old to be good mimics. But, I'm going to attempt it, and hope to see some improvement you can spot.

Working in the SAC and using the program called, Clear Speech from the Start, Cambridge Univ Press, I'll be offering active practice for those who desire it, as a test of its usefulness. I plan to make before and after recordings, and invite native speakers to identify "which is which".

I'm hoping for an eight week commitment to an hour a week, in two half hour sessions. I hope somebody signs up....

[mejms]

Pronunciation is something that I've practiced head on with my students. I have a list of the 100 most difficult to pronounce words for students and based on that list, I've drawn up a group of sentences that combine the words in some sort of context. But surely this is something to address every class when students are speaking. Repeat after me...

[gregd75]

Yes, 'repeat after me' is definitely something to do... but what about the raising of the voice when asking tag questions, or the 'th' pronunciation, or V vs B, amongst many many others.

I think these are the real challenges here.

[jaimem-g]

I think one of the reasons that pronunciation and intonation get little attention is that not much is included on this in the most popular books sold by the major book publishers. Looking for world wide sales they leave this up to teachers to deal with on a regional basis or for the teachers to determine according to the native language of the students.

Of course there are some specific classes for this, such as "accent reduction" classes, but I think commercial interests in the sale of books and for too much belief in a traditional grammar and reading model of instruction makes this easily overlooked by learners and even most teachers.

As already mentioned, little kids do not have much of a problem with mimicing, but it's a real problem for a adults. As we well know, this is one of the biggest headaches of public school English in Mexico.

[PlayadelSoul]

I think some books are moving towards a more corpus-based approach.

For example, words that we would never have taught before, such as "uh", huh?", "wanna", "yeah", "gonna", etc., are now seen as essential to listening comprehension, at a minimum. They are used so often, to not make students aware of their existence is negligent, IMHO. Of course, it takes years to develop a good "wanna" when speaking, but it is an important part of the language, IMHO. "Yeah" is used much more than "yes" in real-life, for example. Not entirely on topic, but somewhat related.

[Enchilada Potosina]

I think one of the reasons pronunciation is so badly done or avoided is that teachers have no idea what/how to teach it. Most don't bother to learn the phonetic symbols either - a useful tool for teaching. A tefl course doesn't prepare you to teach pronunciation and a lot of subtlety is missed by monolingual language teachers due to their lack of L1 knowledge. Heck, most go around calling it pronOUNciation... god help us.

[Guy Courchesne]

[notamiss]

My viewpoint is from the outside (not being a teacher), so I�d be interested in your opinion on my observations.

1. Accent isn�t a problem per se, it�s a problem when mispronunciation impedes comprehension by a native speaker. For example, even if the Spanish-speaker persists in using a Spanish r in English, it tends not to impede comprehension.

The most common stumbling blocks to comprehension that I hear in Spanish-speaking learners of English are:

2. Not being able to sufficiently approximate sounds in English which don�t exist in Spanish; English v and b, th, as gregd75 mentioned above, others such as h and j, and all those English vowels which don�t have equivalents in Spanish.

3. Pronouncing letters which sound very similar to their English versions as they were in Spanish, even though they aren�t actually the same in English; t, d, p, g, and y (as a consonant), for example. From what my academic acquaintances here tell me, this causes problems for practically every Spanish-speaker visiting Yale. Taxi driver, incredulous: �Ya want me to take ya to jail?!�

4. Intonation: schwa-ing and de-emphasizing the unstressed syllables and knowing which consonants can (and sometimes must) be softened or left out.

North American English speakers, say the following two sentences out loud�as you would say them in conversation, not teacherese�and listen for the distinguishing difference. It's not the �t�, but the �a� in �can/can�t.�

I can understand.
I can�t understand.

I�ve heard speakers commit a full house of errors (1, 2, 3, and 4 of the above) who apparently had never been taught (or had never absorbed) that even though the letters in English look the same as in Spanish, they�re not pronounced the same. I don�t mean that they said everything phonetically, but it sounded as though any word they hadn�t practiced in class was tackled in this way. A memorable example was a tour guide who massacred the word �bird� in this way. I suspect none of the English-speaking tourists caught on to what this �beerth� she was talking about really was.

[gregd75]

My personal favourite mis-pronounciation is, of course, beach and bitch

Makes me smile ever single time.

I think my point when starting this thread is that students can learn English from a book, but they can't learn pronunciation. We need to take advantage of this 'gap in the market'.

Students desperately want to improve their pronunciation and yet we still avoid it, because we don't really feel comfortable teaching pronunciation.

It's not easy. But it would make a hell of a difference for our students.

[mejms]

[Dragonlady]

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[Dragonlady]

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[Isla Guapa]

[Dragonlady]

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