Pronunciation for ESL teachers and students Richard Clark Arroyo
Richard Clark Arroyo (2015)
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INDEX
TO THE READER
2
GETTING STARTED. (VOCABULARY AND CONCEPTS)
3
IN CLASS CONTRIBUTIONS.
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OUT OF CLASS CONTRIBUTIONS
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REFLECTION
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TO THE READER A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
The intentions of this magazine is to introduce different terms and concepts that are seen or used in a teaching pronunciation class, it is up to the reader to continue a furder investigation about those concepts and applying them. The magazine will cover from basic concepts such as the international phonetic alphabet, vowels, consonants to a more instructional teaching area.The magazine will also present ideas and tips that were seen in class for ESL teachers in order to help the students to continue their progress, and the activities that were applied on the different pronunciation activites and service learning projects during the course.
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GETTING STARTED. VOCABULARY AND CONCEPTS
Throughout the course, many concepts were covered in order to understand what the teacher’s role on oral skills is. Generally, many teachers tend to avoid the real process of teaching pronunciation, which it involves a lot more than just simply practicing repetition. Consider that whenever you´re teaching pronunciation, is not just simply making student repeat the same word during the whole class, you need to have the context in order for the student to actually feel that it is something worth to learn, also the teacher needs a good knowledge base, to be aware if issues that may affects students capability of pronouncing. Also there are really good tools that will help on how to organize your lesson if it’s based on pronunciation (Description and analysis, listening discrimination, controlled practice, guided practice and communicative practice) and finally but not least, the role of feedback.
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VOCABULARY AND CONCEPTS
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet): This is the main tool for any ESL teacher that wants to focus on pronunciation. The International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA for instance) was designed as a standardized representation of the sounds of oral language, the symbols are composed of one or more elements of two basic types, letter s and diacritics.
Vowels:
THE NAE SYSTEM
In order to reach that neutral accent that many students, so as teachers, want to reach, you have to understand the different sounds in the vowel system. They are classified based on the position of our tongue, there are 6 different positions. Meaning that there is a total of twelve different ways to pronounce the vowels, making that each vowel has two ways to pronounce it.
The NAE system, it was created to teach the vowels to students that speak languages that only held from five to eight vowels sounds. Students that speak languages such as Japanese, Chinese, most of the Romance languages and African will present this situation, there are plenty of difficulties for the learners whenever they try to learn a language that has a big range of vowels sounds. They tend to clip all tense vowels such that they may sound like lax vowels, they also to confuse vowels that occur in adjacent positions in the vowelquadrant.
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VOCABULRY AND CONCEPTS
The Consonants: In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Another way to think of consonants sounds is as the solid blocks with which we construct words, phrases and sentences. These blocks are connected, or held together, by a more malleable or fluid material, which they are the vowels of the language
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IN CLASS CONTRIBUTIONS DIFFERENT WAYS TO IMPROVE THE STUDENT’S ATTENTION
There are different techniques and approaches that involves a lot the psychological mindset of the student, by incorporating knowledge from other disciplines, we can open up avenues to enhanced pronunciation learning. Multisensory Reinforcement Techniques: While it sounds something really big, it is actually quite simple. By working with different senses (sight, listening‌) It engage learner awareness on multiple levels. One of the primary means of enriching the classroom environment is through visual reinforcement. Which you can use different images to support the sound that your group is working on, this will break down the ego boundaries of leaners and undergoing changes even in fossilized pronunciation. So remember, images do care. Fluency Circles or Double circle: This technique is quite interesting and very productive for the student point of view because it covers from practicing time, interacting with their classmates, and the opportunity to correct themselves. An example on how to apply it, the class is divided in half, the learners stand up and form two fairly close concentric circles, the inner circle (listeners) faces out and the outer circle (speakers) faces in. The next step having the speakers to tell a story or anecdote that they remember and the listeners will take notes summarizing the events. .
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DIFFERENT WAYS TO IMPROVE THE STUDENT’S ATTENTION
Imitation techniques: Imitation techniques are very effectives whenever is about introducing a new sound of the second language. An example of it could be, that student will interpret a dialogue that have already learned, but they will come front of the class and mime it without words. Next they mouth the words silently as the mime their dialogue. This cover part of a technique called silent vowels, this is basically the teacher role modeling the lips and jaw position while the students do the same thing without pronouncing it.
Shadowing and mirroring. Both are pretty similar in what they accomplish, but there is a small difference. While shadowing allows the student to repeat without mirroring its movements, mirroring let the learner mirror every facial expression involved.
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OUT OF CLASS CONTRIBUTIONS AN EXPERIENCE IN TEACHING PRONUNCIATION
Next on, here are the ideas and activities that were developed throughout the course, many of these ideas takes elements of the techniques that were seen during the course. First you will see the instructions that were used and then a comment explaining why and how this was used.
Tongue twisters. “Create 5 tongue twisters; use the following consonants on the list. The tongue twisters can either be a sentence long or several sentences.” Working with tongue twister are really entertaining and engaging for the students. Not only involves their pronunciation skills, it also involves the use of creativity and thinking to complete the activity. Story writing “Write a story by using the International Phonetic Alphabet; you can use a dictionary if you need it. The story must have at least 3 paragraphs. “ This one was designed for advanced students, by working with IPA and reviewing all the symbols that they went through.
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AN EXPERIENCE IN TEACHING PRONUNCIATION
Memory game: “There will be different sets of cards with monosyllable words, which they will have a pretty similar pronunciation (Fan, Fun, not, nut, cat, hat) Also, each pair of similar sounding words will be colored to ensure the learners understanding and progress of the activity. Now, as a classic memory game, the cards will be facing down and they can either search the pair of words that are similar on their pronunciation or just base on the color.”
This activity was designed for beginners mostly, this was meant to not just only work on their pronunciation skills, but to also extend their vocabulary. Test of perception: “The students will be given different items with 2 options, a recording or the teacher will pronounce one of them and the student will identify it and circle it.” This activity works pretty well with beginners, specially kids. Testing the student’s perception on the differences between vowels is a good way to reinforce their knowledge.
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REFLECTION MY THOUGHTS ABOUT THE COURSE
Pronunciation is one area of teaching which is often neglected. This is evident in the way that pronunciation is treated in most course books. Flicking through half a dozen books on my desk, I found only one which has regular pronunciation activities in the units! I also notice that when I talk to teachers, there are a few who say they try and do some pronunciation in most lessons, but the majority either do very little or none at all! Why is this? Well, there are a number of reasons. First, many aspects of pronunciation are difficult to teach (or at least that is the perception). Secondly, unlike a grammatical or functional area of language, it can be quite difficult to build a lesson around a pronunciation point and therefore such points are add-ons to a unit in a course book or a lesson in the class. Thirdly, teachers often feel under prepared to teach pronunciation and many seem to struggle to learn the phonemic alphabet (although this is certainly less true of many non-native-speaker teachers). Therefore, having the opportunity to be assess on such area, to be able have a rehearsal and be able to understand very important but rarely seen concepts is such a great for future teachers.