Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Chapter 12: What Accent? Teaching Pronunciation 181

Imagine how this dialogue sounds in the following cases, especially the

response ‘nice’:

✓ A mum is talking to her 14 year-old son who is a computer geek and
heavy metal fan.

✓ An elderly man is talking to his wife who’s too ill to travel far.

✓ A woman is talking to a man who’s attracted to her. He had hoped to go
for a romantic stroll.

Other words that tend to need intonation to indicate the intention are okay,

oh and fine.

When students do listening exercises from a CD or other media they can then

use the tape script to role-play the dialogue themselves, copying the intona-

tion. They may need to go through it line by line, repeating after you or the

CD, before trying it out. They can also play games where they each have a

versatile word and a meaning or mood to convey. They can take it in turns

saying their word while the class guesses the meaning or mood from a choice

of options.

When you write utterances on the board, you can indicate the intonation pat-

tern by using arrows, such as those in Figure 12-2.

Activities to try

Activities to help your students understand pro-

nunciation, stress and intonation may include

the following:

✓ Use a map of local train stations and streets

to practise saying place names. You can

swap the names for phonemes and see if

students recognise them.

✓ Play a homophones games. Homophones

are words which sound exactly the same

but have different meanings, such as here

and hear. Say the word and see if students

can come up with both spellings and mean-

ings. You’ll be surprised to find that students

often don’t know that certain words are

supposed to sound the same.

✓ Have your students put on a mini-play.

Drama is fun and encourages students to

use good intonation.

✓ Play ‘I spy’ using phonemes instead of let-

ters of the alphabet.