Explanations: Tell students how to produce the sound,
using clear, simple, concrete descriptions. Where does the
tongue touch? What are the lips doing? For most groups of
learners, avoid technical language as much as you can.
Remember that explanations alone are not enough, and
simply telling is not teaching. Descriptions are a good
beginning, but they need to be combined with
demonstrations and visuals.
Videos demonstrating sounds: Several websites have
short videos giving explanations and demonstrations of how
to produce sounds. However, check the quality of the video
contents carefully before you use it in class. Some look good
at !rst glance, but are actually inaccurate or misleading.
Links to some reliable sources can be found on the website
http://teachingpronunciation.weebly.com Ú Resources for
Teaching Pronunciation.
Visual symbols: Some teachers and students like to use
phonemic symbols to represent sounds; others hate them. For
young children, they’re too abstract and just won’t work well.
For adults, especially visual learners, phonemic symbols can
provide a “hook” to connect a sound to and to help them
keep all those strange new sounds from seeming like a
shapeless, confusing mass. Other students are just confused
by the symbols, especially if they’re also just starting to learn
the English alphabet. Used judiciously, phonemic symbols
can be helpful, especially for sounds that don’t have a
consistent spelling in English. (See also “Should you use
phonemic symbols in teaching?” in Chapter 14, “Di"erent
Places, Di"erent Learners.”)Sounds can be represented visually in other ways if phonemic
symbols don’t seem helpful:- Represent each sound with a color, either one whose
name contains the sound it represents (red for /r/, yellow
for /y/) or one that just seems to !t the sound. (I’ve
always thought that bright, warm colors like yellow and
orange !t better with front vowels, and rich, cool colors
like blue and purple are better for back vowels. Gray
seems good for /ə/. What do you think?) - Represent each sound with a picture of an object or
animal that contains the sound: a dog for /d/, a monkey
for /m/, an elephant for /ɛ/.
For young learners, any of these representations can seem
friendlier, less threatening, and easier to remember than
traditional phonemic symbols.
Gestures and movements: Gestures or body movements
can be used to represent sounds and remind students of how
they’re pronounced. For example, holding one hand with the71