Job Discussion Forums

[jpvanderwerf2001]

Hi all,
I'm giving a five-part seminar on pronunciation to non-native English teachers starting in a couple of weeks. Has anyone done such a thing before? If so, what resources did you use (online or books)? How would you go about it?
I taught pronunciation (ie, accent training) for a year in India and have a pretty good idea, but I'm always open to new insight!
Thanks in advance.

[ls650]

Hmmm. I'm not sure whether you're looking for something specific to teaching non-native teachers or just students in general.

Here's one exercise I've found highly effective. Find some interesting topics to write dialogues about. Break the students into pairs or small groups and have them write up the dialogues. They should then perform the dialogues in front of the class as you record their voices on tape.

Collect up the dialogues and find another native English speaker to help you make a second recording of the dialogues on a different tape.

Return to the class and give the students back their dialogues. Next, play their original recording, followed back-to-back by the native speaker recording on the second cassette. Ask the students to tell you what's different in the two pronunciations.

By about the third dialogue, the students start noticing the errors in pronunciation before I play back the native speaker recording. I've found this to be extremely useful.

[dmb]

Useful books for any teacher re: pron.
'Teaching English Pronunciation' Kenworthy. longman ISBN 0-582- 74621-3
'speaking Clearly' Rogerson & Gilbert. CUP ISBN 0-521- 31287-6

and for teacher trainers Part 2 module 4 of 'A course in Language teaching' Ur. part of the cambridge teacher training and development series. Sorry I don't have the ISBN ( i only have a photocopy )

[Justin Trullinger]

My two best "quick fixes" for pronunciation are: Word stress, and sentence stress.

Teach how to identify "meaning words" in sentences, then may students EMPHASIZE them. (I do it with hand gestures.) This does wonders for accent, particularly in the way it causes weak forms to become, well, weak. Just like native speakers. It also helps with development of a more natural rythm.

Word stress is harder, but identifying stressed sylables can be done through listening. Sylable counting can be a help here, especially with words that non-natives tend to put an unnatural number of sylables in. (Unfortunately, comfortable, vegetable, and any other word that seems to have more sylables than it really does.)

A close second favourite for me to teach is "ed" endings in the regular past simple. I like to get them jumping back and forth between different classroom areas that correspond to different "ed" sounds.

Have fun.


Justin

[Kent F. Kruhoeffer]

Привет JP


In terms of online resources,

this link may be interesting:



http://www.soundsofenglish.org/

[valley_girl]

There are lots of online resources and software available that can be useful tools in teaching pronunciation. I've used Pronunciation Power in CALL classes in the past and the students found it to be a useful aid for them.

Other than studying the basic 'rules' of pronunciation, I find that my students generally need additional help with their endings (-s, -ed) and to that end, they benefit from learning to understand the difference between voiced and voiceless sounds. However, I tend to focus more on intonation because this seems to make the biggest difference in their pronunciation overall. I spend a lot of time on syllables and syllable stress, sentence stress (and how it changes meaning), and question stress (yes/no, wh-, tag).

Pronunciation isn't my favourite skill to teach, so I don't envy you the task.

[dmb]

[jr1965]

I'd spend most of the time on the so-called suprasegmentals (intonation, linking/reduced speech, sentence and word-level stress, and then even things like how we parse groups of words into chunks when we speak: for example, in the U.S. I always said my phone number 555 [pause] 5555. Here in Spain, when I say my cell # it's 55 [pause] 555 [pause] 55 [pause] 55. This was hard for me to say (and especially understand!) at first. It's not that I don't know the numbers; it's that when I first heard phone numbers said this way, it threw me and I had to ask the person to repeat the number (see the 1st book below; if I remember correctly, there's an activity that deals with exactly this kind of thing).

You say you're teaching a 5-part seminar. I'm not sure how long each session is, but you could almost focus on each one of the above items: introduce it, get people to think about how it's used (or not) in their native language, explain and get participants to notice usage in English by presenting examples in a context, focus on activities that teachers can use to get their learners practicing with the lang. Remember to include listening as well as speaking practice with whatever the focus is.

Good books: "Clear Speech" and "Clear Speech from the Start"
Author: Judy Gilbert

[Stephen Jones]

Do remember to place practice on the differences between your students L1s and English, presuming they all have the same L1.

And bear in mind that they may well know theoretically the individual phonetic differences, but fail to understand, stress, intonation both within the word and within the sentence.

Incidentally back-chaining makes it easier to keep the stress and intonation of the whole sentence than front-chaining.