pronunciation

Teaching pronunciation: contractions

Contractions often come up as a pronunciation point in our Elementary level lessons. My students don’t have much trouble with ‘I am’ becoming ‘I’m’, but contractions with ‘you are’, ‘we are’, etc seem a bit harder to produce. I feel that if learners are struggling to produce it that’s one thing, but struggling to notice a contraction might be more problematic with regards listening. Context would help a lot anyway (especially with present continuous given Ving would follow), but I’m (contraction) trying out a few things to get learners noticing contractions more, and noticing whether or not they are actually producing contractions themselves!

This was my attempt the other day. The class have already done quite a bit on contractions, so I thought I’d test where they were. I made a load of cards with sentence on like these:

Etc. Nothing special. Students read a sentence to their partner and followed the instruction whether to use a contraction or not. Their partner guessed – ‘contraction’ or ‘no contraction’. To my surprise, genuinely as I thought they were pretty good at recognising these, they got a lot wrong!

We did a bit of drilling again, and students looked through the cards and tried to say each phrase in both forms (with/without contraction). Students tested each other again, but this time they chose whether or not to use a contraction themselves. Recognition improved – we eventually narrowed down the problem to the use of ‘You are/You’re’ which the students were really struggling with.

It’s nothing great, just some drilling and noticing. It was useful though. It was nice to hear students even at Elementary level trying to give reasons why they felt something wasn’t a contraction when there was ambiguity…

‘No, you still say two words. ‘You are’. Not one word. It’s more like one word. More like ‘YOUR’ – Y-O-U-R.’

Fair description I thought, especially for the level.

Feature image: imgur.com

I’m writing a series of short posts in response to Martin Sketchley’s blog challenge. You can view his new blog here.

Lesson idea: Kahoot! for word stress

Just a quick idea for using Kahoot! here. I found I was using it for the same purposes – grammar meaning/form checking, gap fills, consolidation at end of lesson, etc. I wanted to branch out. Turns out it works well for reviewing word stress too. Here are a couple of screen shots from our food-related word ‘stress check’ the other day… (more…)

Correcting pronunciation errors from Thai speakers of English

There are plenty of posts online explaining typical pronunciation errors from Thai speakers of English. Most seem accurate, and are a good starting point if you don’t have a copy of Swan’s Learner English to hand. (more…)

General ideas for teaching pronunciation

(This is a follow-up to my post on phonology-based activities. I’m sharing it now because some of our teachers are about to begin training for the Trinity DipTESOL. Phonology/pronunciation features quite a bit on that course, so I want to offer our teachers an ideas bank to help them explore this area in class)

Here are a load of random pronunciation activities to try out in class. These activities have pretty worked well for me with students aged 9-16. This is a work in progress! I’ll add more to this list when I get more time or try new things. (more…)

Word stress – footballs and sticky balls

I like teaching word stress. I have various ‘go to’ activities for noticing and practising word stress – stuff like this:

Using Cuisenaire rods

Humming the stress pattern
Fist pumping when you say the stressed syllable
Building vocab based on stress and word formation – tasks like these activities from Book of Pronunciation:

and…

A ‘stand up/sit down’ game… Students in a group of 3 or so. Say a word. If stress is on the first syllable, student 1 stands up, second syllable, student 2 stands up, etc.

What have I been trying recently?

I’m trying to make things more fun for young learners…

I got bored of the stand up game and the rods for a bit, so I brought in footballs and tennis balls. Put students in a group of 3. One person holds the football (main stress), the others have the tennis balls. You say a word and they pass the balls between them to show the stress pattern.

The other fun thing is this…

Get hold of some sticky balls that will easily stick to the whiteboard. Like these:

Pic from dhgate.com

Board the stress patterns, e.g. like this:

Say a word. The students discuss which stress pattern it has with their team. They throw their sticky balls at the correct pattern. Work out some kind of points system. They seem to love this game, or perhaps they just love ‘accidentally’ throwing the balls at me…!

You could also make them throw their ball at a particular stress pattern. They must then think of a word they know with that pattern.