Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Pennsylvania? Are you interested in teaching English in Springdale, Pennsylvania? Check out our opportunities in Springdale, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!
In this unit, I learned how to teach English pronunciation and phonology and why it is important. It is important because how one says something can change the meaning or add to what they are trying to convey. I understand why this is an intimidating subject for most EFL/ESL teachers because stress, intonation, and rhythm are not such obvious units of language that a student needs to learn. However, it’s very important and English speakers use stress, intonation, and rhythm every day to convey different meanings. To convey sarcasm, one changes their intonation, stress, and rhythm of what they said, but if a non-native speaker doesn’t hear it or understand the change then they are losing out on communication. It can also be a cultural difference for some students because what can be an acceptable way to say something in your culture to say may not be in another. I believe it would be best to learn a little about your student’s culture to see if it is something that would need to be addressed.
While in college I took an English Pronunciation course and in the course taught a short course in English pronunciation to non-English speakers. It was incredibly difficult because explaining the different sounds and how to produce and say them all together was not fun for the students at all. I was in a team, and we thought that students would understand better if we explained the sounds and how to produce them with pictures but then you have to teach them about the different locations in the mouth and those technical terms can just go right over their heads sometimes. Some students found it very boring and it was hard to motivate them to want to learn pronunciation. I think our expectations for the class and their expectations for the class were vastly different. It was a great learning experience for me because I had to push myself to keep trying different teaching approaches.
