Pronunciation, is it possible to teach it?
Pronunciation
While learning English, one of the main things to achieve is to manage to pronounce the words correctly. When you mispronounce a word, the person that you are trying to talk might misunderstand you. As an English teacher, I always try to do my best to teach my students English in the best ways possible. Pronunciation is one of key elements which is quite hard to teach. Is it possible to teach someone pronunciation like we teach grammar rules?
Personally, I don't recommend teaching pronunciation by putting some concrete rules, it is quite hard to do that as student don't usually get the logic of it. Another issue related to pronunciation is that there are many different accents in our world. As English is the main language for different countries like U.S.A, United Kingdom, Australia etc, there are many different accents that are used by millions of people. The point is that students don't hear only one accent in their lives, it might be a wrong idea to teach them only one accent.
Stress
As I have explained above, it is not a practical way to teach pronunciation by setting some rules. However, we can try to teach them the stress patterns of some words by making them listen to some recordings or words that have similar patterns. When I teach English in my classes, I usually prefer this way. After each listening, I ask them to pay attention to the stressed words and read the dialogues in pairs so that they can learn how to pronounce them.
It is also a good way of using some different listening parts in the lessons, so they can hear different intonations and accents. When we look at the number of countries and see how English is widely used in the world, they should get the feeling that there are many different ways of speaking the language, so it is not like a mathematic lessons that they can see or hear only some certain rules, they shouldn't forget that English is all the time changing!
Schwa
Teaching pronunciation in a grammar way may not be a good way, but there are some general tips that we can explain to our students. As many English teachers know, there is a schwa sound in English language that we don't stress. There are some examples that you can see in the image above. We can apply schwa sound with some certain letters and we do not stress them while pronouncing, teaching them can be a good idea so that they can use them.
There are many videos on internet that students can improve their pronunciation skills. As we are in the age of internet, learning a language is becoming easier and easier every day, so the best source to learn pronunciation is the internet that many people have in these days. I usually show some videos in my classes that show the difference between English and American accents to make them understand how they are used by native speakers.
Songs and Films
The funniest and easiest ways of learning how to pronounce the words are watching videos and listening to songs in English language. It is hard to learn grammar by listening to songs as singers don't sometimes pay attention to grammar rules, so it is not a practical way to use them to learn grammar, but learning pronunciation through videos and songs is a really good idea!
When I start a new class with fully new students, I share some songs on our common groups that they can listen and repeat the words so that they can learn new words and the pronunciations of them. There are some favorite singers that I like a lot and their accents are really clear. When students listen to their songs, they can try to copy and use them in their own speaking practices themselves.
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strong post))))
Important post there
thank you
You can definitely teach pronunciation, the question is how good will the pronunciation be?? We learned it for reading hebrew when I was going to synagogue as a kid but we never learned how to actually translate or understand any of the language with was a shame.
Students usually have difficulties in understanding its rules and it takes a lot of time to make them practise pronunciation, so I usually advise them to be exposed to language as much as possible!
The only way to learn and maintain a good pronunciation in any language is to practice constantly. If we don't practice the pronunciation of our second language, we will start to mispronounce words eventually.
So practice is everything, and of course, as you mentioned in the post, constantly hearing the pronunciation coming from others is also useful.
Practice makes everything perfect! :)
How nice, your post make us learn. Keep moving @teachblogger
Thank you so much for the support! :)