Some Techniques for Teaching Pronunciation When I did my initial training as an E.F.L. teacher, one of the course tutors always described pronunciation as “the Cinderella of language teaching”, i.e. she never got to go to the ball. By this he was referring to the often low level of emphasis placed on this very important language skill. We are comfortable teaching reading, writing , listening and to a degree, general oral skills, but when it comes to pronunciation we often lack the basic knowledge of articulatory phonetics (not difficult to aquire) to offer our students anything more than rudimentary (and often unhelpful) advice such as, “it sounds like this ; uuuh”.
There is also a tendency for us to focus on production as the main problem affecting our learners. Most research however, shows clearly that the problem is more likely to be reception – what you don’t hear, you can’t say. Moreover, if the “English” sound is not clearly received, the brain of the learner converts it into the closest sound in their own language . Thus the dental English fricative / th / (sorry, phonetic symbols can’t easily be displayed) in “those” ,becomes converted by Spanish speakers into the denatlised Spanish /d/ , producing “dose” as this is what the speaker hears. Given this reality , it would seem logical to place a heavy emphasis on listening (reception) as a way into releasing appropriate pronunciation (production).
Apart from using knowledge of our students and our ears in order to be aware of their pronunciation problems, it is also useful to have some prior knowledge of what elements of English phonetics and phonology are likely to cause problems. This is one area of language learning where few people would question the use of contrastive analysis. For instance, to give some simple examples, we can predict that Arabic speakers will have difficulty distinguishing between / p / and / b / , Japanese speakers will not perceive the difference between / l / and / r / and Spanish speakers will have a problem conscious consonant clusters like [ sts ]. Having informed him or herself of some of the main areas of contrast between native language and target language and what difficulties students have, it then remains for the teacher to build this information into some meaningful classroom exercises.