they practice. It’s important to emphasize suprasegmentals
too, especially pausing in appropriate places, emphasizing
key words, and using natural-sounding intonation patterns.
During speaking activities, correcting students’ pronunciation
errors can be awkward and break up the $ow of the activity.
Instead, take notes during speaking practice of pronunciation
mistakes made by several people and do some quick practice
with these afterwards.
When teaching listening: Learners need to be able to
recognize sounds and words when they hear them, especially
in everyday language using lots of connected speech. When
your class is doing listening practice with recorded materials,
take some time to point out examples of linking, deletion,
assimilation, and other sound processes and have students do
some practice with them. Here are some ways to do it:
- Before or after listening to a recorded passage, do some
practice with the words it contains. In addition to making
sure students understand the meaning, have them
practice saying the words, counting the syllables, and
identifying the stressed syllables. - In the same way, use some sentences taken from the
listening to focus on thought groups, prominence, and
intonation. Have students listen, mark these features on a
transcript of the passage, and imitate the chosen
sentences. Talk about why certain words are emphasized
and why particular intonation patterns were used. What
meaning or feeling is conveyed by the intonation?- Encourage students to use context in deciding what word
they heard, even if they aren’t sure about the sounds.
This is a real-life skill that they’ll need in understanding
spoken language. - Find a recorded dialog and prepare a script with no
punctuation—just spaces between thought groups. Play a
recording of the dialog and ask students to use intonation
to identify questions and statements or !nished and
un!nished thoughts, and to add appropriate punctuation
to the script: question marks, periods, and commas. (It’s
best to avoid less familiar punctuation like colons or
semicolons.) To force students to focus on the intonation
instead of just grammar, include some questions that
have statement word order but rising intonation: It’s
raining? You ate twelve hot dogs? - Dictations are useful in pronunciation lessons, as we saw
in Chapter 7. We can also use dictations during listening
practice to make sure students understand sentences
similar to those they’ve already heard and can segment a
stream of sound into familiar, written words. We can use
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