Introduction

Pronunciation has been gaining recognition as an important skill to cover in English language classes. Many teachers wish to address their students' pronunciation issues, and students themselves want to improve their intelligibility, but there is rarely sufficient class time to do so. Fortunately, limited class time does not have to be a barrier to students improving their pronunciation. In fact, according to Dickerson (1989), students must practice outside the classroom to make significant progress in intelligibility. There is evidence that students can improve their pronunciation skills through various kinds of independent practice (Ingels, 2011; Sardegna, 2009; Tanner & Landon, 2009).

These findings are good news for teachers whose class time does not allow for more pronunciation instruction and practice. However, we cannot expect students to know what specific steps to take in order to improve their pronunciation on their own. Rather, we as teachers need to provide them with concrete activities and resources they can utilize to make improvements in their pronunciation.

Teachers can help students in three main ways:

1. assisting in diagnosing areas of difficulty¹,
   
2. raising awareness of main pronunciation features of the target language², and
3. teaching specific pronunciation improvement strategies that provide independent practice with both segmental and suprasegmental features.

This article focuses on the third, providing a collection of guidelines and sample activities that will enable your students to work independently to improve their pronunciation.

Below are the 13 strategies we introduce to our students.³ They have been divided into four types:

1. Self diagnosis and goal setting;
2. psychomotor development through drilling;
3. practicing with longer discourse; and
4. real-world application.

Some will be more relevant to or resonate more than others with individual learners. Rather than expect students to master and use all, we suggest students experiment with and adapt those that best meet their individual interests and learning styles. Each strategy is written from the perspective of a teacher giving advice directly to the student.

Self-Diagnosis and Goal Setting

Before starting on a course of learning, students should ideally know what areas of the target language are similar to or different from their native language (Venkatagiri & Levis, 2007), have an understanding of what their pronunciation strengths and weaknesses are, and decide which areas they need to focus on most and where they need to put most of their efforts in order to make tangible pronunciation progress. They can do so by using the following strategies:

1. Contrastive Analysis: Become aware of the typical pronunciation errors made by speakers of your first language. What are some problem sounds for speakers of your language when speaking English? Do you make some of the same errors?

2. Goal Setting: Based on your contrastive analysis (see #1), your experiences communicating in English (see #13), and your plans for using English, decide which pronunciation points are most important for you to work on. It’s best to be as specific as possible so that you can focus your practice and track improvement in these areas. Are there particular vowel or consonant sounds that you need to work on first? Identify one or just a few of these. What about word stress, sentence stress, and intonation? Are these creating challenges for you and making it difficult for people to understand you? Revisit your goals regularly to acknowledge where you have made progress, and to add additional goals as needed. Be sure to practice the points you identify as your focus in all of the strategies.

Psychomotor Development Through Drilling

After gaining an understanding of where they are and what they wish to achieve, students need to engage in exercises and practice to build muscle memory and improve vocal apparatus motor coordination. Drilling fell out of favor after the audiolingual method was replaced with more communicative approaches. However, pronunciation, which involves many psychomotor processes, requires repetition and drilling with a “focus…on form and accuracy” in order to build muscle memory of new sounds and sound patterns (Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin, 2010, p. 47). Students should make repetition of words and phrases part of a daily or at least multiweekly routine. Teachers should impress on students the need to dedicate a certain amount of time per day or week to repeated and frequent pronunciation drills and practice.

3. Private Practice for Feeling and Sound: Practice the new sound or stress pattern in a word silently or in slow motion, paying attention to how the pattern feels. Then practice the new sound or stress pattern out loud with eyes closed, focusing on how the speech pattern sounds.

4. Drill, Drill, Drill: Read aloud (multiple times!) lists of words (or phrases/ sentences/passages) with many instances of challenging sound(s) to develop your muscle memory. These lists can be found in pronunciation textbooks, online, etc. Or create the lists yourself to include the most useful words/phrases for you.

5. Word Lists: Keep a list of words you must say frequently or need to be able to say clearly and become familiar with the sounds and syllable stress pattern of each word for accurate pronunciation.

Practicing With Longer Discourse

In addition to building muscle memory and developing pronunciation on a micro sound and word level, students need work on suprasegmental features of intonation and pronunciation patterns of larger portions of discourse such as sentences, paragraphs, speeches, and dialogues. A student can master saying a word in isolation, but if he or she cannot transfer that knowledge and say the words correctly in longer pieces of discourse, then that micro work is ultimately irrelevant. Students also need to practice applying pronunciation features in more controlled, to semicontrolled, and finally free production situations.

6. Shadowing (Also Called “Tracking”): Choose a passage of recorded text spoken by a native or near-fluent English speaker. While listening, repeat after the speaker, mimicking the pronunciation features of that speaker.

7. Analysis and Recording: Listen to a recorded passage. Transcribe (or look at a transcript of) the passage. Analyze and mark the pronunciation features. Listen several times and shadow the speaker while talking. Record yourself reading the passage and mimicking the pronunciation features as accurately as possible. Listen to your recording and compare it to that of the native speaker to analyze the similarities and differences.

8. Read and Record: Find a reading in a textbook, newspaper, etc. Mark it for main features such as thought groups/pauses, stressed words, and intonation. Read it out loud and record it. Listen to the recording and evaluate your pronunciation in these areas.

9. Look Up and Say: Practice a new stress pattern in sentences by (1) looking at the sentence or thought group, (2) practicing it a few times, and then (3) looking up and saying the sentence or thought group out loud without reading it. Try this technique with Strategies #6–8 and in any new situation that involves reading and speaking.

10. Oral Journal: Record yourself speaking about the thoughts and events of the day and then listen to the recording and make note of specific areas for improvement. Option A: Take a few notes of words and phrases you anticipate using before recording. Option B: Speak completely freely without prior planning.

Real-World Application

Finally, when the student has done a sufficient amount of practice in private, he or she is ready to apply the skills in authentic settings. In addition to practicing in private both with lists of words and longer pieces of discourse, it is important the learner connect this practice with his or her experiences in real communication. The following activities help bridge these:

11. Anticipation and Silent Rehearsal: Anticipate a lecture, interaction, or conversation you plan to have. Look up any words or phrases you are unsure of. Rehearse what you will say in the anticipated speaking situation and practice out loud (and even record if you wish). Pay attention to stressing key words, using correct intonation patterns, pausing, etc. After the interaction, analyze how it went. What went well? What could have been better? Make a strategy for improvement for the next interaction.

12. Self-Monitoring: Choose 1 to 2 minutes per day during which you will pay very close attention to your own pronunciation in key areas such as word stress, sentence stress, thought groups, stressing key words, using rising/falling intonation, etc. Initially, practice this technique in “low-stakes” interactions such as with classmates and friends. As you become more comfortable with it, you can apply it in more formal situations and lengthen the time.

13. Critical Incidents: Make note of times you were misunderstood. What specific pronunciation features caused the problem? (Mis-assigned word stress? Lack of pausing? Lack of stressing key words? Other?) Use this strategy in combination with #2: “Goal Setting.” Use these critical incidents to adjust your goals as needed.

Conclusion

These techniques will work best for students with a high degree of self-awareness, maturity, and motivation, and who either demonstrate a need for pronunciation practice or specifically request activities they can do on their own. For these students, the strategies could be given as a stand-alone list—along with encouragement to try as many as possible. Alternatively, one or more strategies could be recommended to students as needed, or included as part of a planned curriculum. In any case, students who do work with these activities in earnest can make tangible steps towards improving their pronunciation skills.

Footnotes

¹Diagnosing a student’s pronunciation can include some or all of the following: Having the student (1) read out loud (scripted speech), (2) answer interview questions (free speaking/unscripted speech), (3) fill out a needs/attitudes assessment, and (4) set personal goals, after which the instructor can complete a “speech profile” (see Grant, 2010, for an example of this as well as instruments for student production) and meet with the student to discuss this in terms of needs/attitudes/goals.

²Instruction should address the suprasegmental features—word stress, sentence stress,thought groups, prominence, and so on—the instruction of which has been demonstrated to improve a student’s comprehensibility (Derwing, Munro, & Wiebe, 1998; Hahn, 2004), along with some work on individual vowel and consonant sounds as needed. We provide students with practice in perceiving and producing the pronunciation points as well as with “prediction strategies,” which involve understanding and applying patterns of pronunciation (Sardegna & Molle, 2008).

³Many of these strategies are based on those offered by Grant (2010) in Well Said and Burns and Claire (2003) in Clearly Speaking: Pronunciation in Action for Teachers.

References

Burns, A., & Claire, S. (2003). Clearly speaking: Pronunciation in action for teachers. Sydney, NSW: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research.

Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D., & Goodwin, J. (2010). Teaching pronunciation: A course book and reference guide (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Derwing, T. M., Munro, M. J., & Wiebe, G. E. (1998). Evidence in favor of a broad framework for pronunciation instruction. Language Learning 48, 393–410.

Dickerson, W. B. (1989). Stress in the speech stream: The rhythm of spoken English. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois.

Grant, L. (2010). Well said: Pronunciation for clear communication (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Heinle.

Hahn, L. D. (2004). Primary stress and intelligibility: Research to motivate the teaching of suprasegmentals. TESOL Quarterly, 38, 201–223.

Ingels, S. A. (2011). The effects of self-monitoring strategy use on the pronunciation of learners of English. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Educational Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA.

Sardegna, V. G. (2009). Improving English stress through pronunciation learning strategies. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Educational Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA.

Sardegna, V.G., & Molle, D. (April, 2008). Empowering students with pronunciation learning strategies. Unpublished paper presented at the TESOL 2008 International Convention and English Language Expo, New York, NY.

Tanner, M. W., & Landon, M. M. (2009). The effects of computer-assisted pronunciation readings on ESL learners’ use of pausing, stress, intonation, and overall comprehensibility. Language Learning & Technology, 13(3), 51–65.

Venkatagiri, H. S., &Levis, J. (2007).Metaphonological knowledge and comprehensibility: An exploratory study. Language Awareness, 16, 263–277.

Recommended Texts

The following texts are well suited for independent learning:

For intermediate to advanced learners

• Well Said 3rd ed. by Linda Grant (Heinle, 2010)
• Focus on Pronunciation (Book 2 or 3) by Linda Lane (Longman, 2005)
• English Pronunciation Made Simple by Paulette Dae (Longman, 2005)
• Pronunciation for Success (video/CDs/workbook) by Sheryl Holt & Colleen Meyers (Aspen Productions, 1998)

For lower-level learners

• Focus on Pronunciation 1 by Linda Lane (Longman, 2005)
• Well Said Intro by Linda Grant (Heinle, 2007)
• Pronunciation Pairs 2nd ed by Baker & Goldstein (Cambridge, 2008)
• Clear Speech from the Start by Judy Gilbert (Cambridge, 2001)

Online Resources

The following websites may be helpful for independent pronunciation practice:

• For demonstrations of vowel and consonant sounds: The University of Iowa Phonetics Flash Animation Project
• For minimal pair practice: American English Pronunciation Practice on ManyThings.org
• For pronunciation of sounds and syllable stress of words: Merriam-Webster.com
• For longer recordings (with scripts) to practice shadowing and analysis: SpeakingFrog.com and TED Radio Hour on National Public Radio

Char Heitman has taught ESL/EFL in the United States, Japan, Holland, and Spain for the past 24 years. Her professional interests include pronunciation, oral skills, project-based learning, alternative assessment, curriculum design, materials development, cross-cultural communication, and teacher training.

Patricia Pashby has been teaching English as a second/foreign language in higher education settings in the United States and Thailand for more than 25 years. Her current interests include cross-cultural communication, pronunciation instruction, international teaching assistant training, and language teacher education.