In this post from the authors of Interactive, Helen Hadkins explores some ways to integrate pronunciation into your classes.
Teenagers are often shy about their pronunciation in English, but that’s all the more reason to provide them with a safe space in class to experiment with sounds. Teachers are sometimes a bit wary of phonology as well, believing it to be impossibly technical – but it doesn’t need to be at all. Here are a few easy ways of integrating pronunciation into your classes, and not a phoneme in sight! (Phonemes are coming in Pronunciation activities – Part 2.)
Working on word stress
– Patterns – On the board or IWB, write up different sets of stress patterns with bubbles:
| 1 O | 2 O o | 3 O o o | 4 o O o | 5 o O o o |
Explain that the students are going to write the words you have looked at previously (e.g. a vocabulary set: interesting, hard-working, intelligent, etc) in the correct column, and get an example from the class. Students look at the exercise in the book, say the words aloud in pairs and write them in the correct box – you could read them aloud as extra help after they’ve had a go on their own. (The boxes are numbered to make it easier to check their answers during feedback).
– Variation 1 – Stick little posters around the room with the bubbles on. Read out the words and get the class to point to the correct stress pattern. Then get the students to play the game in small groups, taking turns to read out words. If you have the space, instead of pointing, you can get students to move to the correct poster when you call out the words (although this could turn into a rugby scrum with a lot of groups, so be careful!).
– Variation 2 – The bubbles / words can easily be turned into a game of Pelmanism, the memory game. You need a number of small pieces of card: half for words and half for the matching stress patterns. Turn over the cards on a table so the blank side is up and move them around so they are mixed up. Player 1 turns over two cards (without picking them up and moving them); if the cards match, the player keeps them and has another turn. If the cards don’t match, Player 1 turns them back over, leaving them in exactly the same place. Then it’s Player 2’s turn, etc.
– Variation 3 – Prepare dominoes with words and stress patterns to match up. Not enough time to prepare Pelmanism cards or dominoes? Get the students to make cards in groups for other groups – they could also choose the words to work on from the course book. The process of making the cards will make them think about the stress patterns. You do need to check that they are correct, though.
Working at sentence level
– Marking the main stress – See this exercise for a lead-in to looking at sentence stress (B1/B2 level)
Interactive Level 3 Student’s book, Unit 12, exercise 7
Follow on by taking a short passage from an audio script in the book (after you have worked on the listening tasks) and get the students to mark all the main stresses. Next, they should listen to the audio again and check that they were right. After that, they should read along with the audio, concentrating on the correct stress. If you like, you can play the section again and again with the audio progressively quieter (“shadow reading”). If the audio is a bit fast for shadow reading, just read yourself – loudly, then quieter. This is a very simple activity, but can make a huge difference to your students’ pronunciation.
– Variation – For higher level groups, besides marking the main stresses, get the students to mark the intonation in the text, paying especial attention to whether the speaker has finished one chunk of information (fall), or has more to say (rise).
– Contrastive stress – Read out a section of the course book (e.g. a reading) the students have worked on before, but make some factual mistakes, e.g. the name of a country, the gender of a person. Get the students to correct you with the correct stress, e.g. “No, it was his mother!” or “No, it wasn’t his father, it was his mother!” After a few examples, students can continue in small groups – the person making “mistakes” has the book open, the others have it closed.
– Schwa spotting – Look at what the schwa sound is, if you haven’t before, i.e. the sound in teacher, cinema, America, etc. Take a short passage from the course book (reading or listening text) and count the number of schwas (before class). Have a competition for the first pair to get the correct number. You’ll need a way of showing the answers at the end – OHT or interactive whiteboard.
Interactive Level 3 Student’s book, Unit 7, exercise 7
– Count the words – Play sentences from the course book audio and get the students to count the number of words. If they get the number wrong, this is probably because they are not aware of weak forms, catenation (linking), elision (sounds left out) or assimilation (sounds changing), and this exercise is a good lead-in to looking at these – not all at once, though!
– Gap fill – linking / weak forms – This is a good activity to use with songs or film trailers. Write out some sentences from part of a song or a film trailer, with gaps next to words which are hard to hear because they are weak forms, linked to the previous word or sounds are missed out.
Do you want ___ dance with me? (to – sounds like wanna)
He’s ___ nice boy but he’s not ____ you. (a / for – both weak forms)
With higher level groups, you can get the students to prepare sentences for each other for homework, then play the trailers / songs in class and fill in the words. However, you will need to check the sentences first to make sure they are correct (and acceptable for use in class) – a lot of songs / films are hard to make out, but the interest value makes this worthwhile.