Description and Analysis — oral and written illustrations
of how the feature is produced and when it occurs within
spoken discourse
Listening Discrimination — focused listening practice
with feedback on learners’ ability to correctly discriminate
the feature
Controlled Practice — oral reading of minimal-pair
sentences, short dialogues, etc., with special attention paid to
the highlighted feature in order to raise learner consciousness
Guided Practice — structured communication exercises,
such as information-gap activities or cued dialogues, that
enable the learner to monitor for the speci!ed feature
Communicative Practice — less structured, $uency-
building activities (e.g., role play, problem solving) that
require the learner to attend to both form and content of
utterances (Celce-Murcia et al. 2010)
These steps do not have to be done all in one lesson. They
could easily extend over many practice sessions, especially if
pronunciation is only one element among many in your
curriculum. You’ll also !nd that the steps overlap to some
extent, and there’s not always a clear distinction between
them. If you’re not sure which category an activity belongs
to, don’t worry too much. It’s more important to do a variety
of activities leading from simple to more complicated than to
classify the category of each activity.Finally, the sequence of activities doesn’t have to be a one-
way street. Even after you’ve gone through all the steps, you
might want to circle back to an earlier stage and do more
practice. Review is a good thing.Let’s look more closely at each step in the process.Description and analysis
A better name for this !rst step might be “introducing the
sounds,” since it doesn’t necessarily have to include verbal
explanations or explicit analysis. There are several ways to
introduce sounds, depending on the age and abilities of the
students and the preferences of the teacher:Demonstrations: Show how to produce the sound. Use
your own voice and mouth as
a model. You can supplement
this by using a dental model to
show how to produce the
sound. Use your hand to
represent the tongue and show
its position and movement.70