Teacher Discussion Forums

[pengyou]

I have been teaching English in China for more than 13 years and am now in Taiwan. I am teaching English in a public primary school and it just dawned on me that I might be in a position to teach children how to speak English properly the first time, rather than have them spend all of jr, sr. and uni years trying to unlearn the wrong pronunciations that they learned the first time.

The one major mistake (one of many, but the one that I think is most annoying to me and frustrating to the students) that I have seen in all 14 years of my teaching overseas is that local English teachers teach their students how to speak English word by word, rather than how to speak in phrases.

I would like to get some feedback on this topic. Please feel free to share any links that might be useful or to give me useful search words.

[fluffyhamster]

Shouldn't that be 'incorrect'? ('Uncorrect' might for all I know be a verb though e.g. can one "uncorrect" the so-called corrections that MS Word often suggests one accepts?).

Hmm, where to start? If you're interested in helping develop fluent and connected speech, try searching for mainly phonetics terms like: assimilation, clitic (but more enclitics then proclitics, in English at least!) compression, contraction(s) (re. apostrophes), elision, ellipsis, haplology (but nowadays more under 'elision'), prosody/prosodic features, reduction.

I'd also suggest Googling for Roach's 'A Little Encycopedia of Phonetics'.

I don;t have that many "practical" books on pronunciation teaching, but one that isn't bad (though perhaps a bit dated now, and even out of print?) is Kenworthy's Teaching English Pronunciation.

[Lorikeet]

I did a great deal in my pronunciation classes on the kind of "fast speech" we use in American English. You can see what I mean at my (alas) unfinished but grandly titled "Listening to American English" exercises I started when I was learning how to use flash. http://fog.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~lfried/activity/listening/listeningexp.html If what's there makes sense and you wonder what I would have done next if I'd had the oomph, let me know