Thursday, 4 June 2015

Linking Sounds Board Game

I love resource books with photocopiable activities; they provide fun and engaging activities to practise a language focus or skill. You can take a break from the course book and get the learners talking, moving and thinking. There are so many available on the market for grammar, vocabulary, speaking and role plays. But, there aren't that many for pronunciation. Mark Hancock's Pronunciation Games is probably the one that is in most teachers' rooms and most well known. To fill this gap, we need to develop our own resources that we can keep and use again and again. It can be time consuming, but it's worth it in the long run.

Although in recent posts I've been promoting including little snippets of pronunciation during vocabulary and grammar lessons, I do believe there is room for longer practise activities. Kelly (2001) mentions that there are three types of pronunciation teaching:
1) integrated
2) remedial
3) practice

In this post, I'm sharing a board game that I've put together to practise linking sounds in connected speech. It is aimed at C1 level learners and focuses on giving opinions and having discussions. I would recommend using the game as a way to revise linking sounds. So, you will need to have introduced the idea of linking /j/, /w/, /r/, and consonant to vowels in previous lessons.

Click below to download the game:

Board game and instructions
Question cards


If you try out the game with your learners, I would appreciate any feedback on improvements that could be made or on whether or not it was successful.


 
 
 
Reference:
 
Kelly, G. (2001) How To Teach Pronunciation. Pearson