If the goal of our speaking and listening classes is for students to become effective communicators, it is necessary to include pronunciation in our lesson plans. Pronunciation is essential to speaking; it doesn’t matter how good a student’s vocabulary is or how few grammar mistakes he or she makes if the listener can’t make out what the speaker is saying. However, the hours we have with our students are hectic, and it may be challenging for teachers to squeeze pronunciation into their instruction and activities. In spite of this difficulty, there are some simple ways instructors can blend in pronunciation practice with other elements of their curricula.

First, the five core pronunciation features (intonation, sentence stress, thought groups, word stress, and linking and blending) need to be learned before they can be performed. Though this explicit instruction is necessary, it need not take a great deal of class time. To save time and reduce workload, instructors may want to create a “grab bag” of mini-lessons they can pull from semester after semester. For instance, in my metaphorical “grab bag,” I have a consciousness-raising activity; a short PowerPoint lesson; some fun, physical choral repetitions; and tried-and-true practice activities. Thus, when a teacher is ready to introduce a particular feature, all he or she needs to do is pull out the mini-lesson and carve out 15 minutes of class time.

CONVERSATION

The two core pronunciation features I associate most closely with conversation are intonation and sentence stress. First, intonation is vital to speaking because it carries the attitude of the speaker; furthermore, it “has the power to reinforce, mitigate, or even undermine the words spoken” (Wichmann, 2005, p. 229). In other words, how we say something is more powerful that what we say. Moreover, because intonation differs from language to language, if a student reverts to the intonation of his or her L1, he or she may be communicating an unintended message. For this reason, it is crucial that students learn about English intonation. Teachers can integrate this important feature into their lessons by first having students participate in a quick awareness-raising activity. Ask students to stand up one by one and say a sentence or two in their native language. (If there is more than one student who speaks a given language, you need have only one representative of that language speak.) Draw students’ attention to the musical features of each language and have them think about the musical differences between their language and English. Then, teachers can give a brief mini-lecture about the characteristics of intonation in English. Once the students understand the basics of English intonation, the teacher can begin to include choral repetition in dialogue practice. For instance, if students are reading a conversation, the teacher can have them chorally repeat a few lines while conducting (raising and lowering their arms) or humming to draw focus to the intonation of the dialogue.

Sentence stress is another important feature of conversation, as “It is common for students to emphasize every word when they are anxious to be understood. This gives the appearance of agitation or insistence that they may not intend, and it certainly diminishes the effectiveness of the prosodic ‘road signs’ that the listener needs” (Gilbert, 2008, p. 14). In order to raise students’ consciousness about sentence stress, instructors can help them to visualize the difference between a language that gives weight to every syllable (like soldiers marching) and English, which gives weight to the content words (like children running). After another mini-lecture, students are ready for practice similar to that described above. When they are reading dialogues (or anything else, for that matter) aloud, instructors can choose a segment for analysis by asking which words are the important words, which words have the most meaning to the conversation. After students have identified the stressed words, they can chorally repeat them. A fantastic strategy for helping students to slow down on the stressed words and speed up on the unstressed words involves clapping. First, read only the stressed words and clap on each one. Then, maintaining the same rhythm, insert the unstressed words. (This strategy is demonstrated in Meyers and Holt’s Pronunciation for Success videos (2001).) Be prepared for a lot of laughing.

SPEECH

In many oral skills classes, students are required to give speeches. Clearly, students need to know about intonation and sentence stress in order to give the best speeches they can; in addition, being able to break their stream of speech into manageable thought groups is also an essential skill. All great speakers make use of pausing in their presentations because it helps the listener to follow the speaker’s ideas more easily. For a fun awareness-raising activity, teachers need to look no further than YouTube. For serious teachers, a clip of a speech by a political leader or activist might work better, but I love a suggestion from a colleague to use the overly chunked language of Michelle, the band geek from the movie American Pie. The clip (it is possible to find a clean one, I promise!) makes students laugh and it is incredibly easy for them to hear the pauses. Then, after another mini-lecture, students can practice pausing between their own thought groups. When a teacher asks a basic question, like “What did you do this weekend?” students can write their answers on the board (or dictate them for the teacher). Then, as a class, decide where the sentences can be chunked. I like to draw slashes “/” between the thought groups and make a “shik” noise as I do it, just for added emphasis. It’s even more fun if students make a downward chopping motion and make the noise with me as the slashes are added.

LISTENING

One of the biggest challenges for students listening to authentic spoken English is the way native speakers run all their words together into one incomprehensible mass rather than treating each word as an individual entity. Again, although the other core pronunciation features are also important (especially sentence stress; if the students are trying to listen to every word in English, they are working way too hard!), there is one feature I consider to be key for listeners: linking and blending. Quite simply, if students are aware of how native speakers join words together, it makes their task easier. In order to raise students’ awareness, teachers can use a visual to show how the sounds of words change when they are linked. There is a great picture of this in Noll’s American Accent Skills (2007) that clearly shows how the “d” moves over to the beginning of the next word in the phrase “hold on.” A great way to squeeze this skill into a listening and speaking class after the mini-lecture is a dictation. Rather than simply hand out a set of conversation questions, teachers can dictate them to the class. Before launching into the discussion, students can identify the links and repeat the questions after the teacher, linking one index finger into another to show the connections.

VOCABULARY

Many conversation classes also devote a portion of their class time to introducing vocabulary associated with spoken English, such as phrasal verbs and idioms, as well as vocabulary necessary for communication on a given topic, such as vocabulary for grocery shopping. Word stress is one of the most essential features of pronunciation in terms of students’ intelligibility. In my (highly unscientific) experience, if I can’t understand my students, it is most often because of a word stress error rather than any other kind of pronunciation (or grammar, for that matter) mistake. This is because “the stress pattern of a polysyllabic word is a very important identifying feature of the word. . . . We store words under stress patterns . . . and we find it difficult to interpret an utterance in which a word is pronounced with the wrong stress pattern―we begin to ‘look up’ possible words under this wrong stress pattern” (Brown, 1990, p. 51, as cited by Gilbert, 2008). Awareness-raising is most amusingly done with anecdotes of misunderstandings resulting from incorrect word stress, of which most English instructors have several. Once students are convinced of the importance of word stress, a mini-lecture with lots of choral repetition is in order. This repetition can be done with the aid of a rubber band (Gilbert, 2008); have students pull on the rubber band when they say the stressed syllables of vocabulary words and relax it during the unstressed syllables. “Stretching wide, heavy, rubber bands while practicing the lengthened vowels can provide students with a kinesthetic focusing tool to reinforce the contrast in duration” (Gilbert, 2008, p. 38). As well, there are a lot of fun, fast warm-up activities that students can do to both reinforce new vocabulary and practice word stress. For instance, the card match puts students into groups easily. The teacher prepares index cards with the word on one, the stress pattern on another, and the definition on another. The teacher gives one card to each student. The students stand up, walk around the room, and try to find the other two cards in their group. Once the students have found their “partners,” they move their books and sit together. This way, students review their vocabulary and get new partners to work with for the remainder of the class.

Incorporating pronunciation into our speaking and listening classes can be daunting, but it is necessary if our students are to become successful speakers. By devoting a little time up front, teachers can pave the way for repeated practice in future lessons.

REFERENCES

Brown, G. (1990). Listening to spoken English. London, England: Longman.

Gilbert, J. (2008). Teaching pronunciation: Using the prosody pyramid. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Meyers, C., & Holt, S. (2001). Pronunciation for success. Weston, MA: Aspen Productions.

Noll, M. (2007). American accent skills: Intonation, reductions and word connections. Oakland, CA: Ameritalk Press.

Wichmann, A. (2005). Please – from courtesy to appeal: The role of intonation in the expression of attitudinal meaning. English Language and Linguistics, 9, 229-253.

Tamara Jones has been an ESL instructor for 16 years. She has taught in Russia, Korea, England, the United States, and Belgium. She is currently an instructor at the British School of Brussels. Tamara holds a doctorate in education from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom.