Pronunciation

 

In an EFL lesson, you may find that students are extremely conscious of the pronunciation sub-skill, yet struggle to improve it. Indeed, an EFL/ESL student may never have ‘perfect’ pronunciation. There are a very large number of accents in spoken English; even among native English-speaking countries. There are so many variations that it is impossible to say that there is only one correct pronunciation.

In order to be understood and for successful communication to occur, students only need a limited level of pronunciation practice. Accordingly, many teachers consider pronunciation less important than vocabulary or grammar, and students’ pronunciation may suffer as a result. Pronunciation may frustrate students (especially in the early stages). They may not be able to recognize differences between the sounds they are hearing and the sounds they are making. This emphasizes the need for the teacher to deal with pronunciation sensitively and have realistic expectations about how long it will take to improve.

Pronunciation is an important skill to focus on in class, as it leads to an increase in overall fluency and a more natural relationship with the target language. By having good pronunciation, students communicate faster and more easily. By increasing a student’s pronunciation you are also increasing his or her listening and speaking skills, and (to a lesser degree) reading and writing skills. He or she will be able to recognize more words that might not otherwise be practiced.

Pronunciation may be improved by focusing on a number of key areas with which students regularly struggle. These are individual sounds, minimal pairs, connected speech, and intonation. Students may have trouble pronouncing individual sounds for a number of reasons. Usually, this is because English uses sounds that are not present in the students’ native language. It may also be because there is some confusion between a sound in English and the students’ native language. Quite often in English, a single letter may have several sounds associated with it depending on the surrounding letters and the roots of the word. This may cause many problems with pronunciation, but as with all problems, this may be worked on.

Voiced and unvoiced consonants are sounds made by either vibrating the voice box or allowing air to pass through. In English they form pairs. When a person’s mouth is in the position to make the unvoiced sound “Fff”, they can also make the sound “Vvv” by giving voice to the sound. To test this, place your hand against your neck and make both sounds. You will notice that your neck vibrates when you make the sound of a voiced consonant.

Minimal pairs are words that have the same pronunciation apart from one sound. Students easily confuse words that are pronounced very similarly. A common example of a minimal pair is “Ship” and “Sheep”, where the only difference in pronunciation is the vowel sound. “Fat” and “Vat” are minimal pairs where the first consonant may be confused. Exercises that deal with the recognition and practice of minimal pairs are the most common form of activity in a pronunciation lesson.

Connected speech is related to the speed of pronunciation. Native English speakers omit and add extra sounds when speaking naturally. When our mouths move between two different sounds (typically between two words), we may inadvertently make (or omit) sounds that would be different if we were simply pronouncing one word alone.

When you, as a teacher, attempt to work on individual sounds, there is one tool that you should always draw on - the phonemic alphabet.

The phonemic alphabet or phonemic chart is a table that breaks down all the sounds associated with the English language. It uses specific symbols to represent the sounds, rather than letters. Most people have seen these symbols in dictionaries or encyclopedias.
The phonemic chart is very useful as it breaks down the sounds of the English language into monophthongs (single sounds) and diphthongs (combination sounds). It also separates sounds into vowel and consonant sounds. Vowel sounds are shown as “long sounds” (vowels which make the sound of the name of the vowel) and “short sounds” (as shown in “tin”, “dog”, or “hat” where the vowel sound is produced quicker and doesn’t say the name of the vowel). Consonants are grouped into voiced and unvoiced pairs. Sounds are also grouped based on the position of the jaw and tongue, which is highly useful when demonstrating the use of the chart in class. By familiarizing yourself and your students with the phonemic chart, you make the teaching and practice of pronunciation much easier.

The following link takes you to the British Council/BBC version of the phonemic alphabet. With this online version, you are able to click on the individual sounds to hear the pronunciation, as well as example words in which the sound is used. This website also features a download link allowing you to save it for later reference, and some ideas for pronunciation activities. In a class that focuses on pronunciation, you may direct students to this chart and show the relationship between the target sounds, and those similar (yet distinct) sounds that students have trouble understanding.

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/phonemic-chart

To really use a phonemic chart effectively, you will need to memorise the sounds and symbols. Also, the sooner students become aware of this way of dealing with individual sounds, the sooner they can self-correct by simply using a dictionary.

When teachers approach pronunciation, they usually focus on two or three sounds and how they are different. This is done by careful demonstration, diagrams and listen and repeat practice. However, there is another area of pronunciation that is not related to individual sounds - intonation.

In an EFL classroom correct intonation is the combination of three factors - word stress, sentence stress, and tone/pitch. As native speakers we give stress to a syllable within a word or a word within a sentence by slightly increasing our volume and slowing down while pronouncing it.

In English, every word has one stressed syllable. Even long words have one syllable more stressed than the others. This is an important aspect of pronunciation on which to focus as some words have the same spelling and pronunciation apart from this syllable. The word ‘present’ for example has only two syllables, yet has two different meanings, each of which expresses a different word form depending on the placement of the stressed syllable. When a word is written in the phonemic alphabet in a dictionary, the stressed syllable is typically shown with an apostrophe. When presenting new vocabulary on the board, it helps if you point out the stressed syllable with a symbol or underline. Stressed syllables almost always feature a ‘hard’ vowel sound, and never a schwa (the sound represented by the symbol Ə on the phonemic chart).

Sentence stress is a little different, in that native English speakers may emphasise (or downplay) several words in a sentence to draw attention to specific parts of the sentence. In a sentence such as “I took my dog to the park yesterday” we may infer a lot of information about the speaker from observing his or her sentence stress. If the speaker emphasises the word “I’ for example he/she is answering the question of “who took the dog to the park?” Alternatively, if the word “park” is emphasized, this indicates that the speaker is discussing “where the dog was taken”. Luckily sentence stress is easily demonstrated for students who have problems identifying it.

Tone and pitch may be the hardest area of pronunciation to teach as these relate much more to the speaker’s intentions and personality than any type of measurable criteria. Students should be encouraged to mimic the way native speakers flow their speech in order to achieve good tone at lower levels. As students’ speaking and listening skills increase to higher levels, this becomes less of a problem.

The main approach to teaching intonation is to focus on the purpose of the target language. Rising intonation at the end of a sentence typically indicates a question or that the speaker is checking the validity of what they are saying. A falling intonation typically shows that the speaker is sure of what they are saying. Leaving intonation at a steady level may indicate that the speaker has more to add. By focusing on intonation in this way the teacher may have to deal with unusual speech patterns such as sarcasm and irony which are usually readily understood by students and may be practised at higher levels.

Students from some language backgrounds will not have a problem understanding and adapting their speech to English intonation. For other students, it may be hard to break the ‘robotic’ pronunciation associated with lack of speaking and listening practice, even though their grammar and vocabulary may be excellent. The most obvious and effective way to improve intonation is to keep students aware of it and increase the chances they have to speak with native English speakers.

Most speaking and listening activities may be adapted to provide focused pronunciation practice and these may be included in almost any lesson. As with all sub-skills, the teacher should attempt to provide clear and focused practice every time they address pronunciation. Pronunciation may be the language focus of a whole lesson, just one task, or even as an aside from the task in progress. Whenever you choose to draw attention to pronunciation, you should engage every student and keep tasks interesting. Do not get caught in the trap of dealing with pronunciation via ‘listen and repeat’ only. Also, do not be self-conscious about the sounds you make and your mouth movements in pronunciation class.