Every English teacher knows that teaching pronunciation is more challenging than teaching grammar.
Proper pronunciation skills are the foundation of any language. Whether it’s English or any other language, it will be difficult to understand what people want to communicate without appropriate pronunciation.
Thus, as an English teacher, you must lay a solid foundation of English pronunciation to help your students master English speaking.
After all, nothing is worse than seeing your students’ self-confidence plunge because of incorrect pronunciation.
But, the good news is you can help your students master English pronunciation with just a few tricks.
In this blog, we have shared essential tips that will help your students while speaking English.
Best 5 Ways to Teach Pronunciation Skills
Speaking in a language other than your native tongue is already a stressful activity. Your students will often be afraid of making pronunciation mistakes, adding more to the stress.
Thus, as a first step, you must encourage your students to practice pronunciation without feeling guilty about their mistakes. After all, everyone makes a mistake at one point.
Secondly, encourage your students to speak the English words aloud while doing their homework. This will help them practice more.
Below are a few suggestions on how to help your students master English pronunciation.
1. Teach With Phonics Exercises
It is the most convenient method to teach English pronunciation. Phonics focuses on teaching how a letter, vowel, or consonant sounds. In this way, students will learn how every letter has a different sound and how the words should sound.
This would help them to understand why some letters sound different when used in different words. Therefore, before jumping to advanced pronunciations, you should teach them about phonics.
2. Use Proper Mouth Positions
This really helps beginners to understand the flow of letters. It is very important for them to know how different letters are spelled. Without proper mouth actions, no one can ever know how any letter is spelled.
For example, let’s suppose there are three words “pen”, “pin”, and “pan”. If you noticed, all of them have almost similar mouth actions. The only thing that makes a difference is the tongue.
When taught adequately, all these details would help students understand how to use muscles in their mouth to create a specific sound.
3. Teaching Methods For Syllable Stress, Intonation, And Vowel Length
While using words in a sentence, it is imperative to know where to focus on the sentence. Otherwise, every sentence will be of the same energy.
For example, when we feel sorry, our sound is quite low. On the other hand, when we are super excited, our sound becomes naturally high.
Teaching syllable stress requires special attention because it is used to express your feelings in some way. To teach this, you can begin by teaching how to count the number of syllables in a word and what to stress upon.
4. User Cross-References While Teaching
You can use minimal pairs to teach how two words sound different with only one different letter. Tongue twisters are an excellent and fun way to teach about different sounds.
For instance, start with easy to difficult tongue twisters like:
“Give papa a cup of proper coffee in a copper coffee cup.”
Or
“She sells seashells by the seashore.”
In these twisters, the sounds/words emphasized are “c & p” and “s & sh.”
5. Use Pronunciation Exercises That Address Connected Speech
Connect speech means how we connect two or more words while speaking. For example, people often use “wanna” instead of “want to”.
For a non-native speaker, it may be a bit confusing. Therefore, you can include exercises in this domain that would help students to grasp the language better.
Conclusion:
English pronunciation skill is an essential skill, and that’s why you, as a teacher, should help your students learn the language and speak confidently. You should be able to teach pronunciation so that it becomes super easy for students to grasp the language.
Therefore, we hope the above-listed points will contribute to your success in teaching. One can also enroll in the best online english speaking course in India.