Byron Center, Michigan TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

From this unit I have learnt that there is a lack of training and confidence in the teachers to teach pronunciation methodically, so it is likely the most neglected aspect of English language teaching. Most pronunciation teaching tends to concentrate on individual sounds, yet it is not really the most important, and not enough. An effective teacher should consider the teaching of pronunciation an integral part of the course, no matter when he/she includes pronunciation work into their lessons. He/she can spend whole lessons, or a slot in each lesson to teach pronunciation, or just deal with the issues as they come up in the class room. The teacher should give time for the students to practise pronunciation, stress and intonation, in order to make sure that they aware of the importance of accuracy and clarity of communication. Intonation is generally considered to be the variation in volume and pitch in a whole sentence, and it carries the message in a sentence, whereas stress is more concerned with individual words. Intonation patterns can also be powerful predictors of the nature of forthcoming information. - Rise->fall intonation are often used in statements or short utterances, or indicating that the speaker has finished what he/she wants to say. - Fall->rise intonation indicates surprise and disagreement, but above all it indicates that the speaker wants the person to whom he/she is speaking to respond or confirm. - Flat intonation indicates that the speakers doesn’t really have much to say, and perhaps doesn’t want to communicate. Sentence stress: the strong part, or the word that bears the principle emphasis in a sentence. The possible meanings of a sentence can be various, depending on where the stress is placed. Word stress in multi-syllable words has two common rules: one word has only one stress, and, we can only stress syllables. Besides, there are a few more complicated rules which help to understand where to put the stress, though exceptions do exist. In normal speech, there are more syllables/words without stress (auxiliary verbs in all forms, articles, pronounces, and prepositions) than with stress, and only the vital syllables conveying the essential information in multi-syllable words are stressed. Teachers can use a number of techniques for indicating and teaching intonation and stress such as the following: - Nonsense words: get learners to speak nonsense sentences with different expressions - By Hand gestures: sweeping hand in the air, clicking fingers, tapping on desk, etc. - Humming or Singing out sentences without producing words - On the board: using arrows, underlines, boxes - Use contrastive stress by putting a voiced sound alongside a non-voiced sound - By Choral work - Stress marks Sounds in English speaking can be joined or linked together in many ways. The closer the students can get to this idea, the more natural their speech will sound. A dictionary can not only state the meaning of a word and gives its class and example sentences, but also provide the pronunciation by using International Phonemic Alphabet which is a set of symbols that represents the way English speakers put sounds together to form words. The students will be able to accurately pronounce any word in the dictionary once they are familiar with this alphabet system. Place of articulation is the physical location of a phoneme’s production which is connected to a difference speech organ or area in the mouth. There are 8 of them: bilabial, labio-dental, dental, alveolar, palatal-alveolar, palatal, velar, and glottal. Each place of articulation might have different manners of articulation among a list of 6 items: plosive, fricative, affricative, nasal, lateral, and approximant. Teachers can apply the following techniques to teach pronunciation of individual sounds: peer dictation among the students, modeling using his/her own mouth, mouth diagrams, phonemes and tongue twisters.