- Have the students compare their markings with a partner,
then talk together as a class about what they found and
why it sounded that way. (For example, they might !nd
that a speaker’s intonation on a WH- question went up
instead of down because she was asking the question for
the second time. She didn’t hear the man’s answer the !rst
time.) - Have students practice reading the conversation with a
partner. Encourage them to try to say it just the way the
characters in the video did, with the same pauses,
intonation, emotions, etc. - Play the clip again. Ask students to try to read the dialog
along with the characters in the !lm. (This will work best
if the characters are speaking slowly.) Do it again if there’s
time. - Review the conversation in a later class by practicing it
again.
It’s important not to rush the process of shadowing. Students
will need to listen to the video clip several times, so short
clips work best. Repeatedly watching and listening to the clip
gives learners a chance to absorb the sounds and intonation
patterns they’re hearing and make them a part of their own
language use. With repeated listening, they’ll notice things
that they didn’t hear the !rst time.
Using songs and music
It seems logical that if we’re teaching the musical aspects of
pronunciation, music should be a good tool. Teaching
pronunciation through songs has several advantages:- Music often tells interesting stories in natural-sounding
language that contain plenty of linking and other
examples of connected speech. If we choose songs
carefully, they can also re$ect the rhythm of natural
speech. - Songs give us a painless way to do repetition. Saying
sentences over and over can get a little dull, but singing a
song many times is much more enjoyable, as long as the
students and the teacher like the song. - Sounds stay in our minds better when we sing them than
if we just say them aloud. We’ve probably all had the
experience of having a song stuck in our heads, but
spoken sentences just don’t have the same staying power. - Carefully chosen music can help students relax and lower
the a"ective !lter in the classroom. This indirectly helps
them learn not only pronunciation, but language in
general.
Songs can certainly be valuable in teaching suprasegmentals,
but we need to use them carefully. Music has its own178