Giving Elementary learners pronunciation confidence.

Last summer, I started teaching an advanced class. In the first lesson, we were doing a vocabulary exercise when one of the students had problems with the pronunciation of one of the phrases. Automatically, I turned to the IPA and broke down the word for him. It was successful and he was amazed. He asked me if we could look at the IPA in a little more detail as he had never seen it or been shown how to use phonemic script. I referred him to The Pronunciation App by Macmillan until the next class. When he came back the next day, he was so excited and said, "Why didn't anyone show me this when I first started learning English? It would have been so much easier." He went on to say that he could look up any word in the dictionary and could pronounce it using the script. We went on to look at other benefits of it too and how it helps when looking at suprasegmental features of pronunciation.
 A few months ago, I was moved to an Elementary class and made sure that I exposed these learners to the IPA and other aspects of pronunciation, of course. What I witnessed was wonderful and as a teacher, I felt like I had really done my job. Firstly, my Elems really enjoyed working on pronunciation, and as it was integrated throughout the lesson at all stages, it meant that they were always engaged. They would bounce out of the class repeating different expressions or sentences we had drilled throughout the lesson and would often come back into class with tales of different things they had heard in "the real world" that they could now understand. This made them especially excited as it demonstrated the relevance of what they were learning in class to real life.

So what did we do in class to become more confident in our pronunciation? Here are what I feel were the most important:

• Word stress - Any time new lexis is introduced, we counted the syllables and decided which was the strongest syllable. I like to count these on my fingers and I have the students hold up their hands too. Sometimes we would clap, soft and loud and on occasion we would stamp our feet. I feel that making it physical in this way makes it so much more memorable for the learners and engaging too.

• Weak and strong forms - When studying grammar, especially at a low level, the teacher builds the foundation for the learners. That's why it's vital to include pronunciation as part of your grammar lessons. One of the main things I like to introduce is weak forms and vowel reduction in sentences. So, for example:

                        I can SWIM -  /aɪkəˈswɪm/ - The vowel in can is reduced to a schwa /ə/
                        I CAN'T swim - /aɪˈkæntˌswɪm/ or /aɪˈkɑ:ntˌswɪm/ - The full vowel is present to    
                        emphasis that the verb is in the negative form.

• Drilling - Drilling can be a lot of fun, but also it really builds up the learners' confidence. If you drill as a whole class, it gives the students the opportunity practise their pronunciation in a sea of voices so they aren't afraid of being heard. As they become more confident in what you are drilling, you can reduced the numbers and drill in 3's or 2's which will give you the opportunity to monitor their progress. Sometimes I pick out nationalities or men versus women etc. However, drilling isn't just saying something had having the learners repeat it and then move on. You need to break down the sentence and then build it up by adding more and more until you have the complete sentence. You can do the same with words and breaking them into syllables. When you have built up the sentence or word, then drill smaller groups.

• Connected speech - Making your learners aware of features of connected speech will really help their receptive skills. Again, when you're introducing grammar, think about how you would say the sentence yourself if you were talking to colleagues or friends. For example:

          A cup of tea - A cuppa tea - /əˈkʌpəˌti:/

           Do you like swimming? - /ʤəˌlaɪkˈswɪmɪŋ/

• Use other students as models; this gives a real confidence boost. I work in a multilingual context, so I had a variety of L1's in the class. In this particular class there were Spanish speakers from Venezuela, Mexico and Spain, Portuguese speakers from Brazil, Turkish, Saudi and German. Each language group had different pronunciation difficulties, even the Spanish speakers from different countries had unique difficulties. At different stages, instead of me providing the model all of the time, I asked another student who was pronouncing effectively and had the other students listen and repeat. When the students had become comfortable with me drilling, I then had other students drill the rest of the class. There were two benefits to this. First, some weaker students in other skills grew in confidence as they could provide a good model of pronunciation for their peers. Other students realised that certain aspects of their pronunciation were attainable because if another student can do it, so can they.

• IPA - The IPA and phonemic script are incredibly valuable in assisting your learners with their pronunciation. It helps error correction, explaining word stress, weak forms and connected speech. I feel that it's an essential tool to be able to deal confidently with other areas of pronunciation. It's not necessary for your students to know the chart inside out, but it's something that you can build up over time to help them both in class and in their own autonomous learning.

Happy teaching everyone!