How to Teach Pronunciation
Background
Communication can be a tricky business, especially when the listener and speaker are from different linguistic backgrounds. There are pitfalls aplenty with poor word choice and improper inflection, and there are numerous reasons a student has difficulty reproducing the sounds of English correctly. Perhaps pronunciation had little focus in previous classes, or maybe the student has never had any formal language instruction. Even students with significant educational experience can have problems. Perhaps early pronunciation was taught by nonnative speakers who themselves have oral production problems. Maybe the student’s first language contains different phonemes and the student simply cannot hear the sounds, let alone accurately replicate them. A consideration of learner’s pronunciation errors and of how these can inhibit successful communication is a useful basis on which to assess why it is important to deal with pronunciation in the classroom.
There are two key problems with pronunciation teaching. Firstly it tends to be neglected. And secondly when it is not neglected, it tends to be reactive to a particular problem that has arisen in the classroom rather than being strategically planned.
A question we need to answer is how good our students’ pronunciation ought to be. Should they sound like native speakers, so perfect that just by listening to them we would assume that they were British or American or Australian? Or is this asking too much? Perhaps we should be happy if they can at least make themselves understood.
Discussion
Difficulties in FL Pronunciation
Two particular problems occur in much pronunciation teaching and learning * What student can hear: some students have great difficulty hearing pronunciation features which we want them to reproduce. There are 2 ways of dealing with this:
1. show them how sounds are made through demonstration, diagrams and explanation.
2. draw the sounds to their attention every time they appear
Communication can be a tricky business, especially when the listener and speaker are from different linguistic backgrounds. There are pitfalls aplenty with poor word choice and improper inflection, and there are numerous reasons a student has difficulty reproducing the sounds of English correctly. Perhaps pronunciation had little focus in previous classes, or maybe the student has never had any formal language instruction. Even students with significant educational experience can have problems. Perhaps early pronunciation was taught by nonnative speakers who themselves have oral production problems. Maybe the student’s first language contains different phonemes and the student simply cannot hear the sounds, let alone accurately replicate them. A consideration of learner’s pronunciation errors and of how these can inhibit successful communication is a useful basis on which to assess why it is important to deal with pronunciation in the classroom.
There are two key problems with pronunciation teaching. Firstly it tends to be neglected. And secondly when it is not neglected, it tends to be reactive to a particular problem that has arisen in the classroom rather than being strategically planned.
A question we need to answer is how good our students’ pronunciation ought to be. Should they sound like native speakers, so perfect that just by listening to them we would assume that they were British or American or Australian? Or is this asking too much? Perhaps we should be happy if they can at least make themselves understood.
Discussion
Difficulties in FL Pronunciation
Two particular problems occur in much pronunciation teaching and learning * What student can hear: some students have great difficulty hearing pronunciation features which we want them to reproduce. There are 2 ways of dealing with this:
1. show them how sounds are made through demonstration, diagrams and explanation.
2. draw the sounds to their attention every time they appear