Job Discussion Forums

[Marmalade]

Yipee, I am almost at the end of the 1st week of my CELTA course, and all is going well

I have an assignment due for mon, and was wanting to ask if anyone could give a little help?

I have an upper intermediate Thai women, who has a very good understanding of English and can speak it well.

She does however have a fair amount of difficulty with her pronunciation.

I'm to suggest activities/ways/etc etc to help her improve on this area.

Does anyone know of any good websites/resources or anything that might throw up some good ideas.

All help is appreciated.

Cheers

M

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

Hello Marmalade:

Nice to hear from you again!

Yes, it's true. Thai speakers often have great difficulty with English pronunciation. In particular, they seem to have huge problems with the letters 'th' as in three and 'x' as in next and distinguishing between 'sh' and 'ch'.

On top of that, Thais often REFUSE to pronounce the letter 's' entirely. For example, a typical Thai student will say:

'lat' instead of last and 'hou' instead of house

tree, not three

'nek' instead of next

'chort' instead of short

and so on ...

There's no magic in correcting this, imho. Through patience, practice and repetition, and by showing students how & where to position their tongues inside their mouths (no laughing please!) you can help them to gradually improve.

And by heaping praise on them when they finally get it right.

I also make up cute tongue-twisters when the need arises. They can be loads of fun to do in class with people spitting and laughing their heads off as they struggle to make sounds that they've never made before.

In terms of your CELTA, you're probably looking for something a bit more on the academic side, so here are a couple of links that might give you some ideas:


http://www.fonetiks.org/ (fonetiks.org)

http://esl.about.com/cs/pronunciation/ (About.com)

http://www.soundsofenglish.org/ (Sounds of English)

http://www.sunburstmedia.com/PronWeb.html (Pronunciation Web Resources)

~

[Marmalade]

Cheers Kent,

Nice to know my absence was noticed

That was pretty helpfull.

I shall go test my student on those very areas posthaste, and have a look at those sites too.

Marm

[Gordon]

Try to get your hands on a great book called Learner English by Swan & Smith by Cambridge. The last chapter is devoted to Thai speakers and their pronunciation problems. Your school where you're doing the CELTA should have a copy.

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

Sawadee!

A very good tip by Gordon. Hello Gordon!

If you can't find 'Learner English', here are 2 links that will help:


http://www.allbookstores.com/book/0521000246 (Learner English by Swan)

http://www.allbookstores.com/browse/Author/Swan,%20Michael (all books by Michael Swan)


~

[Marmalade]

I passed my assignment

Thanks for all the input, it was very helpful.

M

[Marmalade]

I passed my assignment

Thanks for all the input, it was very helpful.

M