How would you deal with pronunciation in teaching a foreign language to secondary

students?

Introduction

Pronunciation is the act of producing the sounds of a language, and combining them to form
utterances for authentic purposeful communication. Pronunciation work has traditionally taken
a secondary role in language teaching. Pronunciation is treated as a low priority area of study
vis-à-vis the other components of language such as grammar and vocabulary, and is sometimes
relegated to an “end -of-the- day” activity or a five minute filer to give learners some light relief
fromthe “real” work of language learning Kelly (2004).

Well, there are a number of reasons. First, many aspects of pronunciation are difficult to teach
(or at least that is the perception). Secondly, unlike a grammatical or functional area of
language, it can be quite difficult to build a lesson around a pronunciation point and therefore
such points are add-ons to a unit in a coursebook or a lesson in the class. Thirdly, teachers
often feel under prepared to teach pronunciation and many seem to struggle to learn the
phonemic alphabet (although this is certainly less true of many non-native-speaker teachers).

Rational
One problem is to do with the way in which pronunciation is presented. Quite
frequently, the emphasis is on individual sounds and distinguishing these sounds from
each other. Sometimes there might be a bit of work done on word or sentence stress,
but this is usually limited to tonic prominence and contrastive stress. Some work might
also be done on intonation, but this mostly focuses on questions and question tags. It
seems to me that these areas are chosen not because they are useful for students, or
will help them be better English speakers and listeners, but simply because they are
(relatively) easy to teach. Let me give an example.

One of the few areas of pronunciation that invariably crops up in coursebooks, and
which most teachers talk about having covered, is the regular past endings /t/, /d/
and /ɪd/. But, if we actually look at the usefulness of teaching these endings, we will
notice something significant. Distinguishing between words that take either the /t/
or /d/ ending is really unnecessary, as it is virtually impossible to say a word that ends
with a /t/ sound with a / d/ sound and vice versa. It is, of course, possible to say any
past form with an /ɪd/ ending, even when this is incorrect. Therefore it is possibly
useful to teach which words take /ɪd/ and which don’t. The same can be said for /s/
and /z/ sounds for the third person ‘s’.Phonemes are units of sounds, they are also
known as segments. However, supra-segmental features are groups of segments ;
monosyllabic, syllabic or longer utterances. They are concerned with the prosodies, i.e.,
stress, intonation and rhythm. Unless he has sufficientknowledge of the sound
patterns of the target language, he can neither encode a messageto anybody, nor
decode the received message. Hewings acquaints:
“… for the vastmajority of learners, a native-speaker pronunciation is neither necessary
nor even desirable.” (Hewings, 2004:13)
In a nutshell, pronunciation instruction is of great importance for comfortable,intelligible and
successful communication, since it is an important ingredient of thecommunicative
competence.

DEVELOPMENT

Pronunciation shouldn’t be limited to a particular time in a lesson. Doing so makes

pronunciation seem something of an add-on, an afterthought. Pronunciation can be integrated
at many stages of a lesson, and is a logical part of many speaking, listening and vocabulary
activities.

However, it is also important to consider why you are doing a pronunciation activity. Is it
because it is useful for your students, or is it simply because it’s in the coursebook? For
example, there is little point spending ten minutes of a lesson getting students to distinguish
between two phonemes (sounds) when they have no problem doing so.

It is also important to think about what exactly causes misunderstanding. Is the fundamental
problem to do with the way a particular sound is pronounced (or mispronounced)? Or is it to
do with word stress, sentence stress or intonation? Getting your students to pronounce
individual words perfectly may well not help them much when these words are put into
connected speech.

1.7.1 Statement of the problem

Pronunciation is the bridge through which the message is delivered; proper andcorrect
pronunciation is the soul of comfortable and successful communication. Notwithstanding, it
is common knowledge that a large number of teachers ignore pronunciation in language
teaching, and thereby, many learners also put it apart.

The Teaching of Pronunciation

Consciously or unconsciously, teachers are always teaching pronunciation somehow

(Pennington, 1996). There are five different levels at which teachers can handle
pronunciation in the language classrooms (Pennington, 1996, p. 225): mechanical (e.g.,
repetition of minimal pairs); contextualized (e.g., repetition of key words in a listening
passage); meaningful (e.g., choice of correct word in a sentence or reading
passage); realistic (e.g., a role-play of a situation similar to one that one may face in
real life); and real (e.g., discussion of the students' real-life situation or concerns).
However, in FL classrooms, explanations on aspects of pronunciation are through error-
correction and seldom are explicit and detailed explanations provided (Griffiths, 2011)
to students.
While working on listening, teachers can work on individual sounds which, apart from
increasing students' intelligibility, will enable teachers to get students to realize the
presence of speech properties such as rhythm, stress, and intonation. Other techniques
to introduce students to the matter of pronunciation are tongue-twisters and explicit
explanations.

In the first levels of English, students should be taught phonetics and phonology, which
are the two fields of pronunciation study (Celce-Murcia et al., 1996; Kelly, 2000).
Phonetics refers to the study of sounds while phonology "is concerned with how sounds
function in relation to each other in language" (Forel & Puskás, 2005, p. 3). A sound
knowledge of both will provide students with the ability to hear and correct mistakes on
their own while learning pronunciation.
Rhythm

The basic unit of English rhythm is the syllable. A syllable is most simply explained as
something with a vowel sound at its center. And while the number of syllables in a word is
usually obvious to a native speaker of English, learners accustomed to different phonological
rules may not hear the syllable divisions in the same way. Listening comprehension is increased
when students learn to notice the rhythmic effect of the number of syllables, including small
words such as articles, auxiliaries, and affixes (e.g., the; do; -er; etc.). In easily confused words
like this is/this and late/later the number of syllables is different, so the rhythm is different.

But an understanding of English rhythm involves more than the ability to identify and count
syllables. It also involves an ability to hear and produce the word stress patterns of English.

Only a little imagination is needed to realize that the failure to hear and produce stress
patterns accurately could cause confusion between words such as those in the following pairs:
dessert/desert foreign/for rain his story/history It might seem that context would clarify any
confusion over words like these, but in fact stress errors rarely exist in isolation from other
pronunciation or grammatical problems. The combination of stress errors with other types of
errors can seriously disrupt communication. For example, the following instance of confusion
actually occurred during an English language learning class in the workplace, when a student
took the teacher aside and asked for private advice.

The individual sounds of spoken English are constantly changed by the communication
pressures inherent in the prosody. Put another way, prosody often distorts sounds so much
that they are unrecognizable from the sounds of a word when it is said in isolation.

From the point of view of understanding ordinary spoken English, the failure to move beyond
the basic elementary pronunciation of spoken English must be regarded as disastrous for any
student who wants to 8 Teaching Pronunciation be able to cope with a native English situation.
If the student is only exposed to carefully articulated English, he will have learnt to rely on
acoustic signals which will be denied him when he encounters the normal English of native
speakers. (1977, 159)

Conclusion
Without a sufficient, threshold-level mastery of the English prosodic system, learners’
intelligibility and listening comprehension will not advance, no matter how much effort is made
drilling individual sounds. That is why the highest priority must be given to rhythm and melody
in whatever time is available for teaching pronunciation. If there is more time, then other lower
priority topics can be addressed (e.g., the sound of the letters th, the difference between the
sounds associated with r and l, etc.), but priority must be given to prosody. Teachers are often
hesitant to tackle rhythm and melody in class because these topics are perceived as
complicated and full of nuance. Textbooks on the subject tend to be intimidating because they
present so many rules. However, while intonation analysis can get very complicated, teaching a
threshold level of understanding of the core system is actually quite simple at its most basic
level. Teaching Pronunciation 9 If there is only time to teach awareness of the core system and
practice these vital rhythmic and melodic cues, as well as certain critical sounds (e.g., the
grammar cues at the end of words), students will have achieved a great deal of communicative
competence. But if these prosodic cues are not taught, then efforts at achieving
communicative competence by drilling individual sounds will prove frustrating. After all,
practicing pronunciation by focusing only on individual sounds is like using only part of the
language. As one teacher trainee put it after training course, “Practicing pronunciation without
prosody is like teaching ballroom dancing, only the students must stand still, practice without a
partner, and without music.”

What will you learn?

This course covers a range of areas related to to help you gain a deeper understanding
of how to teach pronunciation in an ELT context, including:

o Sounds in words
o Review of phonology
o Vowels and consonants
o Word stress
o Sounds in sentences
o Connected speech
o Sentence stress
o Intonation
o Teaching tools & skills
o Evaluating and designing teaching materials
o Assessing pronunciation
o English as a global language & pronunciation