Teaching Pronunciation

A pronunciation journey.

Aim of the activity

To practise phonemes which your students find hard to identify.

Preparation

Suitable minimal pairs (words with a single phoneme difference). For instance, for Italiansthe pairs could be:Sheep/shipCheap/chipBeat/bit.The pronunciation journey handout.

Procedure

Present the two phonemes to be identified. For the first phoneme the students mustmove to the left and for the second phoneme they must move to the right. As you sayone of the minimal pairs the students must move to the left or right of the journeydepending on the phoneme. There are 6 junctions. At each junction you say anotherword and the students move their fingers accordingly. At the end all of the studentsshould be on holiday in the same country as you. Students can play this game in pairs,one as the teacher and one as the student.

Variations

To quickly check that students can identify the different phonemes ask them to put theirthumbs up if it is the first phoneme or down if it is the second.Students stand up and jump to the right if it is the first phoneme or to the left if it is thesecond phoneme.

Phoneme poems

Aim of the activity

To practise difficult phonemes by chanting.

Preparation

Pictures of the phonemes you would like to practise.

Procedure

Hold up the picture. Identify everything in the picture and then say the rhyme asking thestudents to repeat it as a whole group and then in smaller groups and then individually.For instance:It’s a cat, sitting on a mat, looking at a rat, wearing a hat and holding a bat. Ask the students to draw their own pictures and put them up on the wall.

Connect Four

Aim of the activity

This technique is used here to practise regular past simple endings - /t/ /d/ /id/.

Preparation

Draw a five by five grid on the board and ask students to give you 25 regular verbs whichyou then write in each square in the bare infinitive. You will also need some dice.

Procedure

Split the class into two groups, X and 0. Give each group a dice. If they throw a 1 or a 2they must identify a verb with a /t/ ending. If they throw a 3 or a 4 they must identify a /d/ ending and if they throw a 5 or a 6 they must identify an /id/ ending. They then sayan appropriate verb and get either an X or 0 in that box. If they make a mistake they missa turn. The winner is the group which gets 4 Xs or 0s in a row. The row can be vertical,horizontal or diagonal.

Walking stress

Aim

To make students aware of the importance of word stress by using a total physicalresponse.

Preparation

You need a variety of nouns with different word stress patterns.

Procedure

Give each student a different noun. They then have to walk out the noun, taking smallsteps for the unstressed syllables and a big step for the stressed syllable. The class canpractise together and then each person presents their noun ‘walk’ and the others decide if the stress is correct or not.

Acting stress

Aim of the activity

To make students aware of the importance of word stress by using a total physicalresponse. It is also a good team game.

Preparation

You need a variety of nouns with different word stress patterns.

Procedure

Put the class into groups of 4 or 5 and give them a word. The students then have tostand in a suitable stress formation from left to right which depicts this word. Forinstance for the word ‘photography’ four of the students would have to stand up in a linewith the first, third and last person crouching down and the second person standing upstraight. The tallest person represents the main stress of the word.

The teacher puts one word on the board and the groups have to stand in thecorrect formation and say the word with the correct stress. The first team todo so gets a point.A variation on this game is to extend the activity into sentence stress whereeach student is a word not a syllable. As an extension to this, students canlink arms if they think their words are linked to each other.

Stress maze

Aim of the activity

To practise identifying words with a similar stress pattern.

Preparation

You will need the stress maze hand out from the session.

Procedure

The students have to find a pathway through the maze and find the correct place to exitwalking only through squares which have words with the particular stress pattern. Thisactivity can be adapted by asking the students to create their own stress mazes.

Sentence analysis games

Aim of the activity

To highlight the importance of the schwa, linking and stress in fast connected speech.

Preparation

You need suitable sentences from poems or rhymes or even just functional everydayphrases.