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?
