Teach Pronunciation – Part Two

How to Teach Pronunciation – Part Two

I hope you downloaded and read the materials in the last pronunciation post about linking and have worked a bit on respelling. Both notions are critical if you wish to help your students with pronunciation skills.

Word and Sentence Stress

Add to respelling the notion of word and sentence stress. Many EFL students around the world will have different stress patterns in their language.

When you pronounce words with two or more syllables, one syllable will be stressed more than the others. Until you practice a bit you may have trouble hearing stress because it is such a natural part of a native-speaker’s speech. Here is what to listen for: tone, length of time, loudness.

For example:

Banana – sounds like buh NAEH nuh

If you listen carefully the middle syllable has a slightly higher tone, lasts longer, and is slightly louder.

But Thai students, for example, will say: buh naeh NUH

Sentences will have similar stress patterns that students need to learn, and respelling can help them with that too.

Some words are not so important to hear and are reduced in time, loudness and tone. Some are more important and are louder, longer, and have a higher tone.

The important words are called “Content Words” – they are nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Less important words are called “Function Words” and are pronouns, helping verbs, conjunctions, and prepositions. These rules are not ALWAYS true, but are good general guidelines.

Example: My name is Bob when written showing sentence stress sounds and looks more like: my NAME is BOB.  Name and Bob being the most important parts of the communication.

Don’t overdo word and sentence stress.  It is important to speak naturally when teaching your students stress. You, after all, want your students to speak naturally too.

Think about sentence stress a bit like this:   When you talk on a mobile or cell phone, you often don’t hear every word and you don’t need to. You get the “gist” of the sentence from hearing the important words. Those are the words that are stressed in a sentence.

Word and sentence stress takes a lot of practice. But the practice is well worthwhile as your students will benefit greatly from your efforts. Don’t worry about getting it slightly wrong. It is more important that you just try it and work with it and develop your skills with it. It WILL make you a much better teacher in the long run.

Excellent resources to help you learn more:

Word Stress

Sentence Stress

Kent University Phonetics Resource Page

The British Council Pronunciation Page

An excellent How to Teach Pronunciation eBook

TED’s Tips™ #1: Visit the websites from the links above and get familiar with sentence and word stress

TED’s Tips™ #2: Put it all together, practice a bit and get to work with your students on REALLY helping them improve their verbal communication skills.

How to Teach Pronunciation in EFL

Methods for Teaching Pronunciation

Teaching Pronunciation in the EFL Classroom:

Part One

Pronunciation is an area of great difficulty for the untrained EFL teacher. But, with a little training and practice you can facilitate the improvement of your student’s pronunciation almost as well as the seasoned professional.

For our purposes here, “Pronunciation” will include the instruction of Stress, Rhythm and Intonation.

Everyone is familiar with the old jokes about Asian students ordering “Flied Lice” and, in fact, such pronunciation problems persist today.

To a large extent, EFL students have problems with pronunciation and stress primarily due to that fact that their native tongues may not have particular sounds and the absence in many languages of “consonant clusters” (strings of consonants).

Use a Respelling System

When studying and teaching pronunciation you will need to learn to use a respelling system to help students get the feel of the language.

Some people advocate the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), but a problem with that system is that few students know it and you will spend an inordinate amount of time teaching it to them only to have them move on to another teacher – who doesn’t use it.

Additionally, there are at least ten other major phonetic systems that appear in dictionaries and pronunciation and listening books. Nothing is universally used.

A simple system is used in the listening book Sound Advice and in the pronunciation book Sound Advantage – both authored by Stacy A. Hagen.

You will see this system used below and in some of the downloads further at the end of today’s post and also at the end of Part Two on Pronunciation.

A simple system that is intuitive and easy to use is critical to your success in helping your students succeed in speaking in a comprehensible way.

EFL teachers are all too familiar with students that approach them and speak clear complete sentences of something that is not even remotely understandable.

A student may well have a good understanding of English and an excellent vocabulary, but if their pronunciation is so poor that they can not communicate – all is lost. That is, until you come on the scene!

Speak Normally to your Students

Students NEED to hear natural fast relaxed pronunciation as we speak it every day, not a carefully over-articulated overly-pronounced one-word-by-one-word phrasing of sentences.

Speaking too slowly and too emphatically is a common characteristic of the untrained teacher.

Speaking unnaturally hurts your students for two reasons.

One, they will imitate your speaking style and speak unnaturally, and two, they will not recognize and understand natural rapid speech when they hear it.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t slow your speech down a bit to help your students get some basic ideas – but it does mean that you should speak naturally most of the time.

It also means that you need to TEACH them what natural speech sounds like. There is some evidence that says if students don’t speak naturally, they won’t recognize normal speech when they hear it.

Linking in Pronunciation

Consider the following:

My name is Fred really sounds like Mi naeh miz Fred.

How much is it? really sounds like How muh chi zit?

The idea of the end of one word connecting to the beginning of the next word is called “Linking” and there is some information about it at the bottom of this article.

If you habitually speak slowly and over-enunciate your students will listen for How much is it? and won’t understand when they hear the normal speech sounds of How muh chi zit?

The skilled EFL teacher instructs her students in these differences, how to pronounce them and how to listen for them.

Consider:

Sue wants to get a better water heater - say it quickly in normal speech and see what it really sounds like. Repeat it quickly several times and listen.

It will sound more like:
Sue wuhnstuh gettuh bedder wadder heeder.

The idea of words sticking together and some sounds becoming smaller is called “Reduction” and there is more information about reductions at the end of this article.

There is, of course, some variation by country and region in how we speak. Learn to use respelling to help your students get it right.

It is important that you get this concept. Untrained teachers will say, “I don’t speak like that!” But they do – you do – all English speakers do.

Respelling?

Should you memorize and use the International Phonetic Alphabet?

No, your students won’t usually know it.

Look in a variety of books and adopt a simple method similar to the one used above.

Will your students confuse “respelling” with the correct spelling of words? No, not if you just tell them, “It sounds like this” while pointing at the respelling. Students intuitively “get it.”

Must you respell something absolutely correctly? No, but be as accurate as you can. The way you respell will be different from someone else as we all have some minor variations in our pronunciation.

Good resources related to today’s posting:

Linking – a Word document

Pronunciation Notes – a Word document

Good Basics from English Club on Linking

An excellent How to Teach Pronunciation eBook

TED’s Tips™ #1: Stop and take some time to listen to how you and other people speak. NOT how you think they speak – but how they actually speak. You will be very surprised. That is what teaching pronunciation is all about – the reality of what things really sound like.

TED’s Tips™ #2: Learn and master your own respelling system. Spend some time working on it before testing it on your students. Again, you will be surprised how much it will help your students.

How to Teach EFL Reading

Teaching Reading in the EFL Classroom

Teaching reading in EFL is a bit different than the way native speakers are taught to read.

While vocabulary is an important part of reading, teaching the reading skills of surveying, skimming, scanning, inference, predicting, and guessing are just as important.

Research indicates that a student’s reading comprehension can be improved by focusing on teaching them skills in the following areas:

Vocabulary

Many languages do not have the word building concepts that English does. In teaching vocabulary, the idea of “root” words, and prefixes and suffixes helps students build a larger vocabulary quickly.

Affixes (prefixes and suffixes) help us create a variety of words from one base word. Many EFL students won’t recognize that contain is the root word of container and containment; or that desire is the root word of undesirable and desirability.

When teaching new vocabulary it is important to point out these connections so we can quickly help students expand their vocabulary with the base words they already know.

Teaching affixes is only one of several strategies for teaching vocabulary. See the links below for more.

Surveying, Scanning, Skimming

In an academic setting we rarely ready an entire text word for word. More typical is that we look at the contents of a book, the chapters, headings, subheadings, sidebars, pictures, illustrations, words in italics and bold type, and then dive in to find the information we need.

These are the concepts of surveying, scanning and skimming, moving from the big ideas of a reading down to the specific details. These are skills that EFL students don’t usually have and must be taught. The linked readings below will give you more specifics on these skills.

Guessing and Predicting from Context

Students also need to be taught to guess the meanings of words based on the context of the reading and to draw from the reading an ability to predict what might happen in the next paragraph. Links below will lead to more information on these skills.

Resources for Teaching Reading:

Teaching Reading – read the entire section and subsections
Teaching Reading Skills – download this PDF file
Skimming and Scanning
Scanning Exercise
Skimming, Scanning, and SQ3R

How to Teach Listening in EFL

Teaching Listening Skills in the EFL Classroom

Listening skills are tied to speaking and pronunciation skills. Most likely if a student can correctly pronounce something and speak it in a natural and common way – she will understand it when she hears it spoken.

If you ever have the opportunity to teach pronunciation and listening together, you will see many similarities in the content that you are covering and be amazed by the progress you can make in both skills at the same time.

Once again you will be teaching students about reductions, linking, stress, and rhythm in natural speech. But you will also – as in teaching reading (listening and reading are “receptive skills”) – be teaching students to listen for main ideas and details. And like pre-reading – you also set the stage with pre-listening activities to set the context for listening.

Teaching listening skills is rewarding as students can often make good gains rather quickly – with proper instruction.

Some good references:

Read the following links for discussions about teaching listening skills
The British Council Listening Page – Read the sub-pages too. This is one of the best sections about listening on the Internet.

Listening Comprehension – Concepts and Exercises

Teaching Listening Skills – an excellent page, read through the sub-pages too.

How to Teach Writing in EFL

Teaching Writing in EFL is often about Teaching Grammar

If grammar comes up anywhere in EFL, it is in the writing classroom. Most EFL students will have some writing skills when you get them. But they will often have an idea that their writing is quite good and generally it will be quite poor.

Many EFL students will have had some experience with paragraph and essay writing, but, in fact, will have very poor writing skills at the sentence level. You will usually need to take them back to sentence level and begin to teach them very basic structure and how to write simply. Run-on and fragmented sentences will be very common until you correct those errors.

The more basic you get with your writing students, the better. Once a good foundation is built, you can move on to basic paragraph writing and on to essays. These skills take time to develop though and you will find that most textbooks will move your students forward too quickly. Don’t be afraid to move slowly so that you students can genuinely acquire the skills they need.

Two EFL writing manuscripts are available to you free, courtesy of TEFL Teacher Training

Download them and read them and you will see EXACTLY how to go about teaching basic writing skills to EFL students.

Sentence Writing Textbook – a draft manuscript for a sentence writing book – you can use this with your students too! Downloads as a PDF file. 1.827kb

You can also download an Advanced Writing Textbook – a manuscript written for university students in Korea who were ready for paragraph writing. The book prepares students for better paragraphs and eventual essay writing. The Advanced Writing Textbook draft manuscript downloads a PDF file 8,215 kb

Review these Manuscripts Carefully

There is a method to the madness and it is important to look at and understand the progression of skills that are required. If you don’t pay careful attention to the skills progression, you will spend a semester or two reading gibberish and providing no more skills to your students than their previous instructors.

Ted’s Tips™ #1: Student egos are fragile things they will often want to write long essays of gibberish to illustrate to you just how proficient they are with their writing skills. It is important to gently take them back to the beginning. Only a lout of a teacher insults their students’ skills – do it gently and positively.

Ted’s Tips™ #2: Writing is an area where you really need to lead students step by step through the required skills. Use the manuscripts provided free here to help your students improve.

Student Motivation in TEFL

Motivating Students in the EFL Classroom

Sparking student motivation is an important part of any teacher’s function.

Effective teachers will make sure that students know why they need to learn the language that is the target of the day’s lesson.

There are several things that the instructor can do to drive student motivation. First, at the beginning of the lesson, build a context where the target language might be used.

Then when building a dialog or structure chart on the marker board, attempt to elicit as much of that language as possible from the students. The more the language actually comes from the students, the more they will be interested in it.

During the “production” or “Activation” component of the lesson be sure that students are using the target language to talk about their lives, feelings, and interests. This makes the lesson more personal and thus more interesting, helping to build motivation. Most people enjoy talking about themselves.

Relevance is an another important factor in building student motivation.

Adults need to talk about adult things, kids need to talk about kid things, teenagers need to talk about teenager things — to build their interest in the lesson. You will sometimes (often?) have to step away from coursebooks to make this work.

One popular coursebook for young learners actually has dialogs about buying cars and airplane tickets, things that those students would never do at that age. Buying a stuffed toy or video game would be much more interesting and motivating to them.

Realia, the use of authentic items in lessons, also builds interest. When teaching about fruit bring some fruit. In a work environment use documents from their daily work as a base for lessons.

A couple good resources are:

General Theories of Motivation and Strategies from Indiana University.

Understanding and Increasing Student Motivation a Power Point presentation from the University of North Carolina – Wilmington.

TED’s Tips™ #1: Recognize that the teacher is responsible for creating and maintaining student motivation

TED’s Tips™ #2: Dig deep to find what really interests your students and create your lessons around those built in motivators.

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