Do you teach pronunciation?

I truly enjoy teaching pronunciation and doing so I don't consider myself a rebel by any means. From my experience both teaching and learning pronunciation can be fun and my learners, in most cases and after getting used to it, enjoy it. On the other hand, when discussing this issue with my colleagues many seem to be quite reluctant and either skip the pron activities or spend very limited time teaching it.

I wonder what other people think about this topic and am a bit disappointed by the low participation in this forum.

Not being a native speaker of English I would also like to ask here how you feel about non-native speakers teaching pronunciation.

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the response. I was too surprised to see so little activity in this pron section.

Concerning "non-native speakers teaching pronunciation" - I'd say that is often advantageous. If your students have the same L1 as you then you have inside knowledge of where the difficulties are and how to get over them. Even with students with different L1s you are a model of success.
Native speaker teachers often get rather scant training in pron, and a monolingual will be at a distinct disadvantage due to not having experienced the processes of learning L2 pronunciation and its effects on communication.

A native teacher might have the advantage when their particular accent is the target, though largely just as a model. A native may also have a wider knowledge of different accents of English (though in a global sense perhaps not).

In the end, I think that native/non-native is far less important than multi-lingual, trained and experienced.

Hi AlexL and adam

It IS peculiar that pronunciation doesn't have more of high profile. It is absolutely critical and not only for non-native speakers. I ask my students every week to think about why they don't understand Scottish people, or Texans, or South Londoners. It's clearly not because they are non-native speakers. You can have all the vocabulary in the world and the most theoretically perfect grammar, but if your pronunciation is bad, no one will understand you - native speaker or not.

I think there is also a confusion between "accent" and "pronunciation". I have a South African accent, but people have no problem understanding me. Being a South African I grew up and lived in a country where there are multiple languages and awareness of that makes one careful to speak clearly and accurately: which is why I totally agree that being a non-native speaker is an advantage - you have the advantage of being used to speaking clearly and carfeully. Many many native speakers speak far too fast and use too many colloquial expressions and just expect everyone else to follow. So here's to multi-lingual, trained, experienced teachers who are AWARE of their OWN pronunciation idiosyncracies.

Without wanting to diverge too much, I'd like to ask others how important they feel rhythm and stress is in teaching English. I have found that it is probably more important than trying to re-engineer a student's vocal chords, tongue and teeth in order to get the exact sound from the phoneme. Indicating word stress and practising the rhythm seems to be more productive in getting the student's pron clearer.

Candy

Hi,
I really enjoy teaching pronunciation to my students. We have a lot of activities which highlight pronunciation of words and they seem to enjoy it thoroughly as well. Its fun and I sometimes use a lot of recorded material to teach them pronunciation.
Suma

Hi everybody,

Let me candidly welcome you all to the online pronunciation area of the Harrogate 2010 Conference and Exhibition. I must confess that from the comments posted here, a lot of activities are already going on. I wish to congratulate AlexL, Adam, Candida, and Suma on keeping the area warm all this while.

I enjoyed reading the comments on the different ways that people react to the importance, or otherwise, of including pronunciation classes in the curriculum. I would like to add that it is a very important aspect of teaching English Language, especially in the places where the English Language is used as a Second Language.

I often make a case for proper pronunciation of English words by students and teachers alike. My reason for doing this is because teachers are role models to students. If a teacher pronounces English words wrongly, the students naturally emulate him.

The problem is worse when teachers of other subjects (who think that it does not matter how their English speech is) are involved. The truth is that when words are not pronounced correctly, meaning is often lost. I recommend an intensive English Language pronunciation drill for intending teachers to pave way for teaching, rather than unteaching.

Peter.

Hi all,

Good to see some people do teach pronunciation! Course books tend not to have a coherent pronunciation thread. How do you organize your teaching? What exactly do you teach?

Candy, I think rhythm and stress are very important. I used to spend a lot of time on weak forms and reduced pronunciations of the kind that native speakers often produce. I've stopped that in recent years except with students who tell me directly they want to be able to produce a particular accent. As you point out, accent and pronunciation are different things.

I think intonation is important too, but a rather tricky one to teach. The rules that appear in course books and even pronunciation manuals seem not to stand up to analysis of real speech.

What does everyone prioritize for pronunciation? Segments, stress and rhythm, pitch?

Cheers,

Alex.

Hi all,

The teaching of English Language in contexts where the language is spoken either as a second language or as a foreign language requires rudimentary methods that progress to more complex aspects. In the aspect of pronunciation, I start with the segments. Most students are not able to distinguish between letters of the alphabet and phonemic symbols. When they are asked to identify sounds in the oral English test, they end up identifying letters of the alphabet. For instance, the sound /k/ is usually confused with the letter 'k'. Ask some students to identify the first sound in the word 'knowledge' and what you will get is /k/ rather than /n/.

In teaching sound segments, I also make efforts to ensure that the students know the state of the glottis, the place of articulation, and the manner of articulation of the sounds. It is not always easy to get them to distinguish between the voiceless alveolar plosive and the voiceless dental fricative, or the voiced alveolar plosive and the voiced dental fricative in such words as; tin/thing and den/then.

I would be very glad if you all can give me more clues on how to teach sound segments effectively and efficiently.

Peter.

Hi all,
It is often said that to be adjudged competent in the pronunciation of a language, the speaker must satisfy speech requirements at different times and at various situations. Furthermore, a person who learns a language after acquiring his L1 tends to do so with a conscious initial effort to extricate himself from the sounds of one system and to get acquainted with the sounds of a different system. This is particularly so if the two sound systems are identifiably different.

This is the case with learners of English Language as an L2. It is often difficult for learners to differentiate between the sounds in the mother tongue language and English language. For instance, the Igbo speakers of Nigeria will comfortably pronounce 'nyam' for 'yam' because of the presence of the /ny/ sound in the language. There are several of such cases in most other Nigerian languages. For instance, the Hausa speaker will say 'pan' in place of 'fan' and 'panta' in place of 'fanta'. For the Yoruba language speaker, 'egg' is 'hegg' and 'head' is 'edd'. The Nigerian speaker of Ijaw language will realize 'Jesus' as 'Zesus' and 'Jonah' as 'Zonah'. All these result from mother tongue interference.

On the strength of the facts outlined above, as English language teachers, is it possible for us to evolve teaching methods that can completely erase mother tongue interference in our students' English speech, especially, in their intonation?

Peter.

Dear All

I was delighted to read all these interesting comments. I do enjoy teaching pronunciation and being a non-native teacher perhaps gives us more awareness as to what difficulties learners may have when producing or trying to understand some pronunciation features (both segmental and supra-segmental features).
What I find most difficult to teach and I consider one of my weaknesses as well is intonation. I find it very difficult to teach and as every language has its own intonation patterns it is very difficult to get rid of our mother tongue intonation.
Any good ideas to share?

best wishes from Uruguay

Hi All
I am glad many people do consider pronunciation as an important part of language teaching. I do find it very interesting and enjoyable to teach pronunciation to my students as well as colleagues. I've become a consultant for pronunciation at my workplace.
Great going to you all
regards
Suma