Intriguing Pronunciation Activator

Do the textbooks you use help you to teach pronunciation? Can your students pronounce and understand spoken language better at the end of your course?  Is there a wide range of activities and features you cover in the class? Are individual sounds practised? Do students develop awareness of spelling-pronunciation rules? Are students able to use monolingual dictionaries to check pronunciation? Is there enough focus on rhythm, intonation, sentence stress in conversation?

Which of these statements are true for you?

• I often tend to avoid/skip the pronunciation activities in the coursebook.
• I do these activities once in a blue moon.
• I do not know how to add activities my students need from other sources.
• I hardly ever “recycle“ what students have learned about pronunciation.
• I don´t know how to help them get rid of their fossilized mistakes in the area of pronunciation.
• I have never played a “pronunciation“ game with my adult students.
• I simply do not feel like teaching pronuncation to my students.
• IPA, phoneme, contrastive stress, what the hell is that?

We will not have a look at a lecture on pronunciation. Today, we will have a look at a couple of activities and games to help you bring pronunciation to the classroom. Make it part of your everyday teaching.

Just do not make big fuss about it. Do not scare your students with IPA and theory. What they need is to play with the language and increase their awareness of some pronunciation-related features. Saying words aloud, playing with rhymes, reading and recognizing homophones, creating tongue twistes, enjoying limerics or knock-knock jokes … this is what really makes the difference.

Read my lips warmer

Silently mouth some words (topic-related,e .g. sports – football, cricket, golf, tennis, yoga) in front of the class and let them lip read and guess the words. Then they can practise in pairs.

Rhyming Pair Memory Game

Prepare cards with words such as a name, box, day, bee. Students work in groups and prepare rhymes for these words on separate cards. Then they pass the set of cards to another group who place them face down and play pellmanism looking for rhyming pairs. 

 Homophone Fairy Tale

Intoduce homophones through my favourite fairy tale. My students love it. Read it. Rewrite it. Play pelmanism with the pairs of words.  Act the story out. Sing it. Record it. Take photos on a cell phone to illustrate it. Write your own homophone-packed fairy tale or story … 

Homophone Relay Race

Divide students into two groups and have one person from each group come to the front board. Read a sentence which uses one of a pair of homophones. The first student to correctly write that homophone on the board scores a point for his team.

Tongue twisters – students create them based on different sounds – do not only limit it to „th“ etc. use the i:  symbol, for example. Meeting people is easy, leaving them is really queasy.

I introduce tongue twisters at Christmas with sentences such as Seven silly santas sitting slightly stuffed instead of sledging silently down the slope … 

The “Yes?!” Game: Write a simple phrase on the board, e.g. Yes. Or How are you.  Student A will say is repeatedly expressing different feelings by varying their stress and intonation. Student B tries to guess the feeling A is trying to express.

Text Treasure Hunt

Students read a text (a paragraph of a text) and try to identify every use of a certain sound, e.g. i:.

Nowadays, many course books use IPA. Students are not required to transcribe words using IPA but they are required to understand the words. This is especially important so that they can look up new words in a dictionary and be able to pronounce them correctly. However, many of them use electronic dictionaries and they just click on the pronunciation button and can hear how the word is pronounced by a native speaker.

Here are some things to do to make students less scared of the IPA symbols. Focus on sounds in words or in context, do not teach isolated sounds.

IPA warmer

Write a couple of topic-related words in IPA on the board. Students try to recognize the words and guess the topic of the lesson.

Song IPA quiz

Write some song titles, movie titles, book titles, etc. in IPA and ask students to decode.

IPA Letter

Write a short email/letter to your students in IPA script (e.g. telling them something about you, the course they are studying). Students can try to reply witing 1-2 sentences about themselves.

Variation: Write a secret message to your students, e.g. what the topic of the lesson is, what activities they can choose from, etc.

Mr/Ms Right

This is an activity to pair students up. Each has a word in IPA, they mingle and look for their partner. The activity can be based on synonyms, opposites, collocations, etc.

Dominoes – word plus word in IPA. Make the learners create the cards !

Boardgames – Use any board grid. Add phonems (symbols) for students to come up with different words or add word stress patterns (using small/big circles) for students to come up with words which copy the pattern or come up with difficult words to pronounce (fossilized mistakes) for them to pronounce correctly or use correctly and say right in a sentence

Phonemic noughts and crosses – write a sound in each square on the board. The Student needs to say a word which contains the sound in the square.

Pronuciation Scavenger Hunts: Ask students to find as many objects as they can with a specific vowel or consonant sound in the classroom or decribing a picture in their coursebook.

A board race – they race to the board to write as many words as they can with the sound of the phonemic symbol you have written at the top.

Dice game  - A variation to my favourite dice game. Write numbers 1-6 on the board. Brainstorm difficult sounds and add one symbol to each number. Then they roll a dice and they have to write/say as many different words containing the sound as possible.

Variation: Match the numbers with „difficult“ words to pronounce. Then they have to make as many sentences using the word as the number indicates. Focus on Czenglish words /fossilized mistakes, e.g. sweater, early, although …

Here are some activities to focus on stress and rhythm.

Syllable pyramids: Have students build syllable pyramids.  The teacher gives a topic (clothing, objects in the classroom, subjects at school, animals, food, etc.) and students race to build a pyramid. (One syllable word at the top, the a 2-syllable word, 3-syllable word, etc.)  

Word stress columns: For the word-stress game, divide the class into two or three groups. On the blackboard, draw a table with three columns, marking each column with the numbers one through three (representing which syllable should be stressed). Read a word with three or more syllables out loud and have the first team to start write the answer in the correct column. For example, if you say the word "happily" the team should write the word under the first column; if you say "understand" the team should write the word under the third column.

Tapping: In pairs, one partner taps a stress pattern and the other partner identifiees any words with that pattern.

Silent Conversation

Students try to identify which sentence in a dialogue the teacher or a student has chosen without them using any English sounds. Either they can wave their arms around to show sentence stress or intonation, or beat out the rhythm on the sentence on the table…

Limerics

Limerics are good for showing them the rhythm of the language. Use these links and listen to, pronounce, and write your own lymerics. 

Well, what do you do to practise pronunciation? Share your board games with us, add examples of homophone fairy tales you have created, lists of words you managed to teach, domino cards you have prepared, rhyming quizes you used!

/bai bai/

Katka

PS Do not forget to go back to the statements at the beginning of the post again next month. Do you feel better teaching pronunciation? What are your tips for teachers who struggle with it?