Forestport, New York TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

This unit covers the teaching of pronunciation and phonology. Pronunciation is probably the most neglected aspect of English language teaching. Unlike other languages, such as Japanese, English words are often not pronounced the way one would assume based on their spelling. There is a great deal of random variation in English pronunciation. Furthermore, most English language learners will never achieve perfect native proficiency and for many, this is not their goal. Still, in order to speak and communicate well, the goal in most English classes, pronunciation is important. The teacher may choose if they want to devote an entire lesson to pronunciation, incorporate it into a different lesson or teach it as it comes up. All of these methods are fine but what we need to understand is that problems with pronunciation will arise and this unit equips us with a sound basis for effectively teaching proper pronunciation. For example, in this unit we learn the rules of stress in English, the function of intonation, four major ways that sounds join together in English, the International Phonetic Alphabet,and techniques for teaching pronunciation such as teaching our students about the IPA and how they can use it as an aid, drawing diagrams for them and using our own mouth to model sounds. The information in this unit may prove challenging for some teachers as it is similar to the material covered in an introductory linguistics class. Although ESL teachers don't need to be able to write a thesis in linguistics, knowing about the basic points covered in this unit such as place of articulation and what a phoneme is, proves useful in the practice of teaching English.