Arabi, Georgia TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

Phonetics and pronunciation are areas of English often overlooked by teachers. Many teachers have a difficult time discerning all the nuances to English phonology, and feel that the students will have little to no chance of understanding it themselves. Beyond that, they often feel it is such a wide and complex field of study that there is no way to standardize it. However, pronunciation is the of large concern to many students of the English language, and even with exceptions we can teach general rules that will give them the building blocks to discover and understand the nuances in time. Stress is an important part of the English language as it can radically alter the meaning of a sentence or phrase. Furthermore, stressing the wrong syllables in words can cause confusions and misunderstandings and although the general rules regarding this have many exceptions, the stressed syllable in a word usually doesn't change. By teaching students about stress as well as instructing them in the dropping, changing, adding, and linking of sounds, we can assist them in sounding more natural and becoming fluent. The pronunciation of English phonemes, on the other hand, can be a source of significant stress to teacher and student alike, but by using mouth charts, student dictation, the modeling of sounds, and the Phonetic Alphabet, we can reduce the anxiety around pronunciation and give students the means to work out the pronunciation of new words they encounter on their own.