And We are back!

Hi there! How are you? It’s been ages since we spoke. I enjoyed my holidays a lot. It's good to be back, though. If you are new here hello and thanks for joining. My name is Special teacher Claudio from Escobar who learned all his snooping skills by watching the movie Escobar and the hit TV show Escobar, now in its thrilling second season.

This is exciting, isn’t? Now, let me get you up to speed. Previously in my life, I proved that teaching to adults can be genuine fun. Lots of them want to learn pronunciation and that’s something that I really love teaching.

This post is going to be about how to teach pronunciation.

Let’s be honest as teachers we teach a lot of things, mostly grammar, and we tend to forget about pronunciation. Last year, I decided I was going to dedicate at least 30 minutes (sometimes more) of each class to teach only pronunciation. I used a lot of what my teachers taught me at the prof. I realized that teaching phonemes is a great way to start. 

This year, I have a lot of students who are going to learn not only the phonemes but also the manner of articulation (I already did but not in detail). Last week, one of my student from Técnica School asked me about, and I quote his words, “the difference between the plosive B and the fricative V in other languages.” I mean, he used the words “plosive” and “fricative.” 

That means he remembered what we learned last year. I realized that most of my students love learning pronunciation. For example, we are reading “Pirates of the Caribbean” with my students from second year, and they really try to make the correct sounds for each letter.

In 5^th and 6^th year, we are working with the book

“How Now Brown Cow.” Students love reading dialogues and copying the pronunciation from the audios. They even performed for me some of the dialogues.

I know, two hours a week is not enough. That’s why I decided to create a blog for my students (Thanks, Miss Racker). In the blog, I can upload books, audios, and also videos in order to practice the sounds.

According to the article I read, these are some of the things you can do in order to practice more pronunciation with your students:

1. Drill, drill, drill.

Students love being drilled – it is fun, energetic and really useful. There are three basic drills:

• Group: everyone repeats together.
• Individual / Scatter: teacher randomly chooses people to repeat.
• Individual / Order: teacher goes round the group in one direction (EG left to right)

2. The Big 3s for Consonants, Vowels, Stress & Intonation

The four key topics in pronunciation (consonants, vowels, stress, and intonation) can be taught through a simple three fork approach as follows:

• CONSONANT SOUNDS – Place, Type, Voicing (a bi-labial, voiceless, plosive is /p/).
• VOWEL SOUNDS – Jaw, Lips, Tongue (an open, spread, front vowel is /æ/)
• STRESS – pitch, volume, length (a stressed syllable is higher, louder and longer)
• INTONATION – fall, fall-rise, rise

From a teaching perspective these explanations are invaluable as they give a nice simple structure to a topic that can be very confusing.

3. IPA is your friend

Most students find IPA a wonderful tool for improving their pronunciation and most can learn it very quickly provided it is presented logically. If the teacher starts with the whole chart it can seem overwhelming, so a nice way to order it is as follows:

VOWELS – Schwa – Long Vowels – Short Vowels – Diphthong Vowels
CONSONANTS – Fricative Consonants – Plosive Consonants – Approximant Consonants – Nasal Consonants

Once students know the IPA system, you can have endless fun with games, crosswords and transcriptions which are challenging, interesting and highly rewarding classroom activities.

4. Learn your stuff

There is no getting away from the fact that English pronunciation is a huge topic, so in order to teach it well and to be able to answer questions that arise in class, it really pays to know the topic well. An excellent book that makes the whole topic very accessible and enjoyable is Roach’s ‘English Phonetics & Phonology’. A more advanced read would be Gimson’s ‘Pronunciation of English’.

5. Think (and teach) in connected speech

A lot of teachers when they first start teaching pronunciation, start to think in separate syllables, explaining that the word ‘about’ would be pronounced ‘æ’ then ‘baʊt’ therefore ignoring the weak form /ə/ at the beginning. This is not helpful for students who need to speak and hear the language in connected speech. Teach joining and weak/strong structures so that students start to experience English as a native speaker does. The best place to start is always with the schwa /ə/ sound within words and sentences.

These then, are the basics – any English teacher with teaching levels from pre-intermediate upwards can add a bit of pronunciation to spice up their classes and give students something they really want.

Last but not least, try to have fun teaching pronunciation. Students love when we make our lessons more interesting.

So, as Miranda Hart says: “Life's stressful enough. Fun it up.”

Ok, see you next time in another, what I call, post.

Have a nice week.