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.

IATEFL PronSIG PCE 2015

IATEFL PronSIG's Pre Conference Event this year was called Practical Pronunciation Teaching. There were a range of talks that had something for teachers at all levels. In this post, I will give a short outline of each of the talks given at this PCE.

Laura Patsko - How to identify pronunciation priorities in the multilingual classroom
  In this session, Laura described to us the steps she takes to decide on what pronunciation features her learners need to develop to be intelligible in an ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) context. She did this by anticipating what areas her learners are likely to have based on their L1. She mentioned that we should not allow stereotypes to influence this step, but rather anticipate based of facts such as those outlines in published literature, and a grid she developed as part of her MA. Deciding on the pronunciation priorities for each set of learners, should be done by looking at what issues overlap.
  Another important step in deciding the priorities is to observe your learners and notice what it is that they need. Laura gave an example of a dictation activity that she uses, and she demonstrated how to go about this. You can find the handouts and more information about Laura's needs analysis process here.

Jane Setter - Flipping Intonation! Making focus on practice practical.
  Jane's decision to introduce the idea of the flipped classroom in her intonation lectures at the University of Reading came about from feedback from her students. They felt that there was too much theory happening in class and that they needed more practical lessons. For anyone who isn't sure, the flipped classroom means that the learners do the homework before to prepare themselves for the next lesson so that they can discuss any problems they have in the lessons and spend more time putting the language focus into practise.
  Jane showed us how she makes her own videos explaining the theory. She then posts the video onto YouTube and her students watch this before going to class. That way, they have plenty of time for practice in class.

Roselyn Young - Articulatory settings: a practical demonstration
 In this session, Roselyn demonstrated how to get in touch with the physicality of pronouncing sounds using French as a model. She used the chart designed by Pronunciation Science which is based on the Silent Way. For many of us, it made us realise how difficult it is for our learners to get in touch the articulators that we require to make sounds in a different language. We starting by discovering a few individual sounds, and then built up those sounds to make words and short phrases. For me, I finally learnt how to make the French oo sound, such as in the word toute.

Sophie Farag - Maximising pronunciation practice through blended learning
  Sophie works for the American University in Cairo. She explained to us how there was little or no pronunciation work included in the curriculum, and so she had to find the tools to be able to increase her learners' awareness and build their confidence in both listening and speaking. She gave the details of a number of online tools and mobile apps that she used both in class to compliment pronunciation homework. She also outlined the various difficulties and technical issues she faced throughout the project.

Robin Walker - IDEAS for teaching pronunciation
  Robin gave a very entertaining and energetic talk on being creative when it comes to pronunciation teaching. He used the acronym IDEAS as guide to how we should teach pronunciation and showed us different activities that he has used by following this guide. Some of his main ideas included demonstrating pronunciation to our learners rather than explaining it to them. Making associations, for example, colours and anecdotes, can be a memorable and fun. Also, try to make pronunciation engaging by taking pronunciation off the page. You can find out more about Robin and his work here.

Get excited about teaching pronunciation - ELTed Limerick June 2014

As promised, I'm posting my presentation from Saturday's ELTed event in Limerick:

Get excited about teaching pronunciation from Loueltblog

 

 

Here are just some of the resources that I recommend and that have helped and continue to help me on my pronunciation journey:

 Adrian Underhill

• Sound Foundations: Learning and Teaching Pronunciation (Macmillan)
• This is the video I spoke about.
• Adrian's Pron Chart Blog
• Macmillan short videos

Books

• How to Teach Pronunciation by Gerard Kelly
• English Phonetics and Phonology by Peter Roach
• Phonology for Listening by Richard Cauldwell
• The Phonology of English: An Introduction for Teachers of ESOL by Ray Parker & Tim Graham
• Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca.

Activty and photocopiable resource books

• Pronunciation Practice Activities by Martin Hewings.
• Pronunciation games by Mark Hancock
• The Book of Pronunciation by Jonathan Marks & Tim Bowen
• Test Your Pronunciation by Michael Vaughan Rees

Online Resources

• Hancock McDonald
• English Global Communication
• Pronunciation Bites blog and Facebook Page
• IATEFL Pronunciation Special Interest Group Facebook page 

Thank you very much for the positive feedback on Saturday. If you have any questions or comments on my presentation, please feel free to comment below, or e-mail me at loueltblog@gmail.com

Value your peers in face-to-face CPD

Earlier this year, I was offered a position as a full time pronunciation materials writer for Kaplan International English. It was a dream come true, not only do I get to be creative and develop my writing skills for digital, but it's all about pronunciation! It was an opportunity that I couldn't refuse, although, I did think, "What's the catch?" But there wasn't one; they were really impressed by the pronunciation lessons I had written for Kaplan's print materials, and wanted me to join their team for a new digital project.
  So, at beginning of March, I started working remotely. We hold meetings on skype and my team members are a call or email away if I need them. Everyone on the team are all uber enthusiastic and want to create the best product we can. I have to say, I feel my days are so peaceful and productive as I have very few interruptions. My health has improved as I'm not running around or as stressed. The pressure of a deadline gives me a buzz, but doesn't really stress me out. It's been a very positive experience up until now, and hopefully it will continue that way.
  Recently, however, I realised how much I missed the face to face discussions, idea swapping and general banter that goes on between teachers. I took part in a forum for teachers who wanted to start writing and having their articles published in ELT magazines and journals. The meeting was set up by ELT Ireland and brought a group of like minded teachers together. I was on a high after the forum and it made me realise the value of face to face discussions with peers.

  There are so many CPD opportunities, forums, webinars and twitter chats available online. Don't get me wrong, these are fantastic and give teachers all over the world the chance to exchange ideas and do research that they don't have in their teaching location. But sometimes, simply nothing beats having a good chinwag face to face.
  I love my job and thanks to ELT Ireland,  I have the best of both worlds; I work remotely in my little world of pronunciation and then I have the chance to bounce ideas off my peers at meeting every month when ELT Ireland hold an event.

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!

/hæv sʌm fəˈni:mɪk fʌn/

Integrating the phonemic script into your lessons can be so much fun. There are so many ways that you can do it (take a look at the Pronunciation page in the bar on the right-hand side), but here I'm going to describe some other ways that I use it, using exercises and activities that we all know and love.

1. Songs - Using a song that contains the target language of the lesson, take out words that are relevant to what you're studying, e.g. emotions, money etc. Instead of leaving the spaces blank as you usually would, put the missing word in phonemic script. Give the students a few minutes to read through the lyrics and see if they can figure out what the words are. Then they listen to check if they wrote down the right word. If they are familiar with the script, you could turn it into a competition to see who can guessed the words the quickest. If they aren't as comfortable with the script, it's an opportunity for them to start getting to know it! I encourage them to use the Pronunciation App by Macmillan too if they're struggling.
2. Back to the board - The phonemic version of this game is pretty much identical to the original game, the only difference is you write the words in script! Divide the class into 2 groups and have them sit in semi-circles facing the board. One student from each team sits with their back to the board and faces their team. The teacher writes a word on the board and the teams have to explain the word that they see. The first person to guess what the word is, wins a point for their team. Writing the words in script adds a little extra challenge!
3. Brainstorm - Give each pair a topic in phonemic script on a card or slip of paper. First they have to decipher what the topic is. When they've discovered what it is, they have to brainstorm words related to the topic. Then each pair have to read out their list of words and the others have to guess what their topic was.
4. Hangman - There has been some debate as to whether hangman has any pedagogical benefits, however, I have to say that phonemic hangman really does. The students have the opportunity to really become familiar with the sounds and the symbols. By saying a sound and having someone else write it, it's beneficial both productively and receptively. It allows them to discover sounds that they have individual problems with too. Give each pair a list of 3 or 4 words. They have to then write them in script. Then make groups of 4 or put them into different pairs and the play hangman!

These are just some of my favourites and ones that the learners have found really engaging while allowing them to gain more confidence in using the phonemic script.