Pronunciation Snippet: Disappearing sounds in expressions

One thing we often forget to do when dealing with new lexical items in class is to let our learners know what this language is going to sounds like in a natural setting.

While looking through a course book recently, I came across a vocabulary activity in the post-reading stage of a lesson. I thought to myself, "these are lovely expressions to teach, but I bet they sound very different to how they look on the page." So how could we integrate some pronunciation into this to give our learners a chance a recognising? Very simply!

In the course book they have gone through the meaning and use of the phrases, so I won't describe these steps here. I have also written my own sentences and added a few extra expressions.

The steps below are to demonstrate how easily we can integrate pronunciation, but for those who are not confident enough yet, please feel free to download the worksheet and notes below to use in class.

Procedure

1. Ask the learners to think about how these expressions might sound when spoken in the sentences.

2. Play the recording and ask them to check their predictions.



3. Write the expressions on the board and mark the features that might occur when spoken naturally.

4. Listen to expressions in isolation. You could go through step 3 and 4 for each expression individually.



5. Listen to some new sentences and ask the learners to fill in the blanks with the correct expression.





Select here for the student worksheet

Select here for the teacher's notes.


You can do steps 1 to 3 any time you introduce expressions in your lessons. You don't have to make a recording, you just simply say the expressions yourself naturally. With practice, this can become a regular feature of your teaching whether you are working with one expressions or many.