Tape the students reading or reciting a passage at the beginning of the year, then tape the same passage every couple of months. Play the tapes for your student and let them hear how much they have improved over the course of a few months.
They will probably impress themselves, and you! Finally, the question of cultural identity has to be dealt with. Some fun activities that can help your students become more sensitive to the subject of accents are doing impersonations, listening to native regional accents and teaching you a phrase in their own language. Impersonations can be done as a class. Students can impersonate famous people, like John Wayne or Nicholas Cage, or they can impersonate teachers — always a fun activity!
The idea is to have them take on a whole different identity and try out the pronunciation that goes with it. Often, your students will produce the best English pronunciation of their lives when impersonating someone else. Be sure to tape them for this as well, since it proves that they can use English pronunciation in a conversation or monologue. Get tapes and videos of English from other parts of the world than your own.
Play or watch them, and have the students pick a few sentences out for you to repeat. Let the students see if they can hear the differences between your English and the English on the recording. Then have them try repeating the phrases in your accent and in the other accents.
Its fun, it gets people laughing, and it helps students realize that there are many correct ways to pronounce English. See if you can get the students to imitate you afterwards. At the beginning level, English learners need to focus on the basics of pronunciation.
In general, the use of rote learning is best for this level. For example, the use of grammar chants is a great way to help students pick up pronunciation skills through repetition. Teaching the IPA International Phonetic Alphabet is too challenging at this point as learners are already overwhelmed with the challenges of learning a language.
Learning another alphabet for pronunciation is beyond the capability of most beginning level English learners. Certain patterns such as silent letters in English and the pronunciation of -ed in the simple past is a good starting point for future pronunciation drills. Students should also learn the difference between voiced and voiceless consonants. Beginning Level Pronunciation Activities.
At this point, English learners will feel comfortable with relatively simple pronunciation patterns in English. Moving on to exercises using minimal pairs will help learners further refine their pronunciation of individual phonemes. Intermediate level learners should become aware of common word stress patterns , as well as sentence stress types. At this point, students can also begin becoming familiar with the IPA. Intermediate Level Pronunciation Activities.
Improving pronunciation through a focus on stress and intonation is one of the best ways to improve higher intermediate to advanced level English learners. Here are a few examples:. Assign a number to each of the minimal pair words you wish to focus on. Then call out the words in your chosen sequence, possibly joined with mathematical symbols e. Students can write down the words and their associated numbers while you speak. Ask the students to give you the final number that all these words add up to.
Obviously just doing a couple of activities once or twice may not fix the pronunciation problems your students are having. Whenever the opportunity arises, you can remind them of these pronunciation lessons and minimal pairs when those minimal pair words pop up again in speaking, listening and reading lessons. This is a great way to continue pointing out the words used in your minimal pairs in context. Then students can hear how they sound again and get a feel for which words have which meanings.
If you're looking for creative ways to teach English, then you'll love using FluentU in your classroom! It's got a huge collection of authentic English videos that people in the English-speaking world actually watch regularly. There are tons of great choices there when you're looking for songs for in-class activities.
You'll find music videos, musical numbers from cinema and theater, kids' singalongs, commercial jingles and much, much more. On FluentU, all the videos are sorted by skill level and are carefully annotated for students. Words come with example sentences and definitions. Students will be able to add them to their own vocabulary lists, and even see how the words are used in other videos. Plus, these great videos are all accompanied by interactive features and active learning tools for students, like multimedia flashcards and fun games like "fill in the blank.
Not to mention, it's guaranteed to get your students excited about learning English! Sign up for a free trial and bring FluentU to your classroom today. Remember that your students also need to learn strategies for dealing with misunderstandings, since native pronunciation is for most an unrealistic goal.
A student's first language often interferes with English pronunciation. Sometimes the students will be able to identify specific problem sounds and sometimes they won't.
0コメント