Chapter 12

Chapter 12: What Accent? Teaching Pronunciation..................................................

Pronunciation

In This Chapter

▶ Asking students to ‘repeat after me’

▶ Displaying phonemes

▶ Adding stress

▶ Boosting pronunciation

▶ Getting the tone right

T

here’s nothing worse than studying a language for years only to find that

nobody can understand a word you say. You write with ease but when

you open your mouth, you’re met with blank stares. This is the experience of

many a student whose teachers underestimated pronunciation skills. So in

this chapter, I tell you how to teach good pronunciation.

Repeat after Me

Probably the simplest way of making students pronunciation conscious is by

getting them to repeat all the new words they learn as well as the words they

find tricky. Before you cringe, erase that picture of students sitting in rows

reciting dull and meaningless sentences. Repetition can be incorporated into

the normal flow of the lesson and can be used to raise energy levels at any

level.

Repeating fi rst

The natural order for learning language skills is listening first, then speaking,

followed by reading and finally writing. With this in mind, when you introduce

a new word students should repeat it after you several times before focusing

on the spelling.