Teaching Pronunciation Teachers often shy away from pronunciation

Teaching Pronunciation

• ´Teachers often shy away from pronunciation work, yet it is key for students. ´ • ´Pronunciation can be an overlooked area of LT, partly because teachers themselves may feel more uncertain about it than about grammar or lexis, worried that they don´t have enough technical knowledge to help students appropriately. However, when teachers take the risk, they are often surprised to find that it makes for very enjoyable and useful classroom work. ´ (Scrivener, 2011, p. 271)

Pronunciation can be taught in: • whole lessons, dedicated • discrete slots (from time to time) • integrated phrases (on regular basis) • opportunistic teaching – when the moment is opportune, when the students “ask” for that

• The concept of pronunciation • the sounds of the language (vowels and consonants, diphthongs, consonant clusters); • word stress; • weak forms; • connected speech; • sentence stress; • rhythm; • intonation;

• The sounds - the phonemic alphabet • Teaching the phonemic transcription – integral part of the language systems (the language systems x the skills)

• The RP pronunciation - ´received pronunciation´ (south-east England UK variety); typical feature – elisions (comfortable), weak forms, lack of ´r´ sound (car, hard) • English – a lingua franca (a language used to communicate between speakers of different mother tongues);

• Goal of teaching pronunciation – INTELLIGIBILITY - ´being understood by a listener at a given time in a given situation´ aiming at something ´close enough´ (Kenworthy, 1992, p. 13) • The objective – not to achieve a perfect imitation of a native accent, but to get the learners to pronounce accurately enough to be easily and comfortably comprehensible to other speakers. (Ur, 1996, 52);

• Why do learners make pronunciation errors? • A particular sound may not exist in their MT (tendency to substitute by the nearest equivalent known); ! mind the unvoiced ´h ´in English, the aspiration with p, t, k (x b – unaspirated) • A sound does exist in the MT, but not as a separate phoneme (/i/ x / i: / in English and Hebrew, /r / and /l / in English and Korean ; phonemes and allophones) (Ur, 53)

• • • Sources of intelligibility problems sound substitution (My friend is sick x My friend is thick); sound deletion (hold x hole); sound insertions (a-speak); (Kenworthy, 1992, p. 18)

• Connected speech – unstressed syllables tend to have weak vowel sounds, sounds get dropped - elision, sounds get changed assimilation, additional linking sounds occur; (Scrivener, 2011, 282) • links between words (a linking sound – e. g. go in x go win; a sound merger, e. g. nice shoe, a composite sound - e. g. this year) (Kenworthy, 1992, p. 18)

• The use of stress • stressed syllable – noticeable by being slightly louder, longer and higher in pitch –getting the stress wrong can seriously damage your chances of being understood; • e. g. : written x retain, desert x dessert; change of the word class – import x import (N x V) • unstressed syllables – less loudly pronounced, vowels - ´weak´

• Getting the learners to perceive/helping learners hear • The first step – to check that the learner can hear and identify the sounds (intonation, rhythm, stress) we want to teach; • discriminating exercises - seeing if the learners can distinguish between minimal pairs; • the following technique – requesting imitation, contrasting acceptable pronunciation with the inacceptable one through recordings or live demonstration (Ur, 53, Kenworthy, 7);

• The rhythm and stress • English speech rhythm is characterized by tone units (a word or group of words which carries one stressed syllable, with other syllables lightened); • Intonation – (rising or falling, a rise-fall, a fallrise) often makes difference to meaning or implication (speaker´s attitude - can be/sound offensive);

• Prominence – sentence stress: • Utterances consist of tone units - sections of speech with one main stress; the main stress – the tonic syllable (nucleus); utterances include other – secondary stresses; changes in prominence – substantial differences to meaning; • (ex. : Caroline was going to leave for Africa on Tuesday. ) • Advice – Cuisenaire rods, tapping, clapping, humming the rhythm – to make students more aware; • Other suitable sources: poetry, songs, shadow reading – see the seminar handout;

Resources: Scrivener, 2005, Learning Teaching; Kelly, 2000, How to Teach Pronunciation; Kenworthy, 1992, Teaching English Pronunciation; • Ur, 1996, A Course in Language Teaching; • •