How would you deal with pronunciation difficulties in a mixed ability classroom of the 2nd Cycle of Primary Education?

(Introduction) Teaching English pronunciation is an area of language teaching that many English teachers tend to avoid. While there are many textbooks and instruction manual available, as well as books on the theories and methodologies of language teaching there is comparatively little on learning pronunciation. Certainly, we need to teach pronunciation. There is a big difference between a ship and a sheep and a pear and a bear. When teaching any language as a second language, our first goal for our students in to achieve the communicative competences, that is, to use the language in real situations. And that cant happen if no one can understand what they are saying. In this essay I am going to give a theoretical background about what is pronunciation and the main problems we should face when teaching it to students in the 2nd Cycle of Primary Education. (Legal Basis) Our curriculum in the Community of Castilla-La Mancha 68/2007 and the Royal Decree 1513/2007 establishes and order the basis for the primary teaching education. In both, we can find the so called Basic or Key competences that we must bear in mind when developing our teaching practice. One of this Basic Competences is directly related with this essay, that is, the linguistic competence. Didactic applications in this competence would be represented in the ability to understand and produce simple messages in English and for that reason pronunciation plays an important role in the EFL classroom. (Theoretical Framework) When thinking how to start teaching pronunciation we may find different approaches in our course books or methodology manuals. Most of them are related with repetition and memorization, and others work on it with spelling, which is also an important skill in English teaching. Actually, researchers have found that our students should start at the level of phonemes. Dictionaries define phoneme as any of the units of sound in a specified language that distinguish one word from another, for example p, b, d, and t in the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat. This definition highlights one of the key reasons that we must, as language teachers, start our pronunciation instruction at the level of the phoneme. Thus the first lessons in pronunciation should involve students in listening and identifying, rather than speaking. Once they can hear and identify a phoneme, its time to practice accurate production of the sound. If we regularly take ten minutes of our lesson to do this kind of focused phonemic practice, our students articulation and perception of phonemes will se improvement after several weeks, and we will get to the point where they can practice pronunciation on a word or even a sentence level.

English is a stress-timed language, thus songs, rhymes and chants are excellent illustrations of the way in which stress and rhythm work in English. (Body of the essay) Now, I will move on to explain how I will deal with pronunciation difficulties in a 2nd Cycle English classroom. First of all, I should mention that I am going to treat errors and mistakes in a natural way, focusing on the content rather than on the form of their speech. We should provide our students with a pleasant atmosphere free of tension that invites students to learn. Most researchers have found that the best way to teach pronunciation with beginners students is through the use of games. They are practicing these suprasegmental features of language without being aware of it. Let me know have a look to some traditional games which have a pronunciation twist. Stress Snap and Stress Dominoes: To practice the recognizing of the word stress within two syllable words. We need snap or dominoes cards which have 2 syllable words and patters oO (as in eighteen) or Oo (like tiger). Pupils have to match up cards which have the same stress patterns. Sound Bingo: To practice recognizing similarities and differences between sounds/discriminating sounds. We need bingo cards with either pictures or words. Students have to cover words which have the same vowel or consonant sound. It is recommended to start with only two or three sounds at first. Happy Sound Families: For this game we need cards with words grouped into four different vowel or consonant sound sets e.g. found, house, mouth, sound; chop, cheese, church and catch. We mix them up and let our students try to find the families by asking their classmates. Tongue- twisters: They are sequences of words that are difficult to pronounce correctly and quickly. We can let our students trying the sound in them in an enjoyable way. E.g. She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore. (Conclusion) As we have seen in this essay pronunciation is a difficult task that our pupils must undergo when learning how to speak and communicate in a foreign language. We should teach and treat this feature of English language in a natural and enjoyable way through the use of games and funny activities. I have tried to explain what are the main characteristics of teaching pronunciation and some games that may be useful for this purpose.