1 Learn how to describe pronunciation. Familiarize yourself with the
phonemic symbols for English, and with a system for describing some basic
intonation patterns. These are challenging tasks, but they can bring rich
dividends. The knowledge will help you to understand more clearly what
your learners are aiming for in terms of pronunciation, and what their
problems are.
2 Record your learners’ speech. It is best to choose moments where one
learner at a time is speaking. Listen to the recordings and see where their main
difficulties lie; especially if you have a monolingual class, they will
probably have difficulties in common. You can then think about which of
their difficulties are most significant: which are likely to form a barrier to
effective communication?
3 Be aware of your own pronunciation. Whether or not you are a native
speaker of English, your accent is probably different from the Received
Pronunciation which your learners may regard as ‘correct’. Learners can
have strong views about some accents being superior to others! Talk to them
about different accents, emphasizing that there is more than one acceptable
model.
4 Teach pronunciation a little at a time. Pronunciation will improve
naturally if you ensure that your learners do lots of listening and speaking.
Intensive pronunciation work can help, but short, fairly frequent sessions are
the most useful.
5 Teach some phonemic symbols. This can be done gradually, so as not to
overload learners. Once they know the symbols, you have a very useful
metalanguage available for talking about pronunciation.
6 Work on learners’ perception of target sounds. Awareness of a sound is
the first step to being able to produce it But if a sound does not exist in your
learners’ first language, or is not significant for meaning, then they may find
it very difficult to hear the essential characteristics of the English sound.
‘Minimal pair’ exercises can be useful here.
7 Tell learners how target sounds are physically articulated. Especially if
learners are having trouble with a sound, an explicit description of the voice,
place and manner of articulation can be useful. You can use a diagram of the
mouth, such as appears in many pronunciation books, to help you here.
8 Work on learners’ perception of intonation. English intonation is, of
course, very significant for meaning. It especially has to do with the ‘shared
knowledge’ of speakers involved in a conversation: whether speakers
perceive what they are saying as new information, or as already understood.
To demonstrate this idea, you will probably need to use recordings involving
several turns of dialogue, where there is a context to help learners to see how
‘shared knowledge’ is built up and assumed.
9 Get learners to produce whole utterances, and combinations of
utterances, during pronunciation practice. That way they work in tandem
on intonation and on the correct pronunciation of individual sounds in
LANGUAGE WORK IN THE CLASSROOM 29