Teacher Discussion Forums

MelanieW · Joined: 07 Jul 2008 Posts: 1

I volunteer with an organisation called CultureLink in Toronto. I meet with a Chinese woman once a week for a couple hours. She's terribly ashamed of her accent.
I've been having her read various newspaper articles and some exercises from ESL books. I feel like just reading sentences and listening to me correct her isn't going to help her with pronouncing certain sounds as much as I'd like it to.
I'm also working on a shoestring budget and was wondering if anyone knows of some free resources online that specifically address pronunciation (I haven't really found anything other than this site!) ... some sound exercises that I could do with her that actually produce results rather than my guess work!

melichan857 · Joined: 06 Nov 2007 Posts: 10

My two favourite pronunciation books are as follows:

English pronunciation in use

Pronunciation practice activities

(links show Amazon description)

I own the second one but haven't gotten around to buying the first one - you should be able to find one or both books at a library if they have an ESL section.

Hope this helps.

Melissa

Mel's ESL Megasearch - search 100's of ESL websites simultaneously

sarah_lou · Joined: 02 Jul 2008 Posts: 6

There are A LOT of really good pronunciation activities online here:

http://maryglasgowmagazines.com/search/search?search%5Bquery%5D=pronunciation&search%5Bscope%5D=&commit=Search

eeaston · Joined: 13 Aug 2011 Posts: 4 Location: USA

There are many sites online specifically for pronunciation:

http://www.youtube.com/user/evaeaston

http://eleaston.com/

http://www.manythings.org/pp/index.html

Eva Easton

Donnetta · Joined: 07 May 2012 Posts: 14

I am so sorry to hear that your Chinese ESL student is "ashamed" of her accent. Erroneously many learners of other languages feel that their ultimate goal in pronunciation should be accent-free speech. Such a goal is not attainable for most adult learners. I would advise you to help her to understand that in a multilingual, multicultural world, accents are very acceptable. And since English has been an international language, native accents have become almost irrelevant to cross-cultural communication. Outside of telling her this, you must remember that your goal as an ELT with regards to pronunciation should be the more realistically focused on clear, comprehensible pronunciation not accent-free pronunciation. At an advanced level of ESL you can focus on intonation, voice quality, phonetic distinctions between registers and other refinements. Good luck!

Bazteach · Joined: 26 Nov 2011 Posts: 5 Location: Seville, Spain

I'm studying for a DELTA at the moment and love these:

How to teach Pronunciation

Sound Foundations

English Phonetics and pronunciation

I've written reviews of a couple:

http://teachingenglishinaforeignland.blogspot.com.es/p/delta.html

Also check out this list I made for the Best ESL websites

http://teachingenglishinaforeignland.blogspot.com.es/2012/11/best-esl-pronunciation-websites.html

Hope that helps...I'm really getting into pronunciation after the DELTA, definitely recommend it.

Bazteach