For many ESL and EFL instructors, the words choral repetition conjure up images of dusty old classrooms filled with bored students mindlessly and listlessly repeating the monotone utterances of the professor. “I go. You go. He goes. She goes. We go. They go.” Integrating choral repetition into lessons aligned with communicative language teaching (CLT) may initially appear to be counterintuitive. Teachers may feel that every moment they spend on choral repetition is time the students did not have to engage in genuine communication. Moreover, it’s an inherently teacher-fronted activity, something that CLT proponents would discourage. “If you say ‘choral practice’ to an experienced language teacher, you will get a mixture of a frown and an embarrassed laughter in return. ‘We left that decades ago’, some will say” (Kjellin, n.d., p. 1).

However, recent years have witnessed the cautious return of choral repetition in ESL and EFL classrooms and many pronunciation experts have argued for the increasing integration of students’ opportunities for quality choral practice into our CLT lesson plans.

Benefits of Choral Repetition

1. Choral Repetition Facilitates Automaticity

Students have a great deal to think about when they are speaking.

If a student is asked to think simultaneously about where to place the tongue, whether or not to use voicing, how to let the air flow, how to link words with preceding and following words, as well as what stress and intonation pattern to use, the complications become so great that the students cannot be expected to produce fluent, natural-sounding speech. (Gilbert, 2014, p. 128)

Trying to implement correct pronunciation strategies while also keeping the thread of the conversation, adhering to English pragmatic norms, using appropriate vocabulary, and applying English grammar rules can be overwhelming and frustrating for students. Through quality choral repetition, students can mimic mouth movements and echo English prosodic patterns until they become second nature. Improved automaticity reduces the cognitive load of students trying to converse in a second language and frees them up to concentrate on the message they are trying to communicate.

2. Choral Repetition Allows for Sheltered Practice

Kjellin (n.d.) encourages teachers to give learners multiple opportunities for choral repetition because when students are exposed to new words, they need to practice saying them with the support of the group until they develop enough confidence to say them alone. Students often lack confidence when learning to speak in a new language. Being able to practice with new sounds and words while being supported by their classmates can help weaker students develop the self-assurance to use the target pronunciation feature outside the classroom. This opportunity to practice a word or phrase several times is especially valuable when the teacher first models the correct pronunciation and then also says it with the students as they chorally repeat, so the teacher’s voice carries the repetition.

3. Choral Repetition Boosts Memory

ESL and EFL students are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the size of their mental word banks. To learn new words, learners need to say them out loud so they can be entered into their brains’ phonological loops (Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998) before the words are transferred into students’ long-term memory. In fact, research indicates that the frequency of learner encounters with new vocabulary contributes more to vocabulary learning than contextual richness (Joe, 2010). An easy way for teachers to ensure students have multiple passes by each new word is by incorporating more choral repetition into ESL and EFL lessons.

However, for choral repetition to be truly effective, it needs to be deliberate. Gilbert (2008) refers to this as quality choral repetition. It needs to be conscious, thoughtful, and critical. Therefore, instead of simply saying words or phrases and having students mindlessly repeat them, teachers need to plan opportunities for choral repetition that include means by which students can consciously focus on one aspect of pronunciation, critically evaluate themselves, and receive feedback on their accuracy. Fortunately, there is no need to re-create the wheel. Many existing pronunciation materials contain ideas for making choral repetition deliberate.

Utilizing Choral Repetition in CLT

1. Incorporate Movement

Physical gestures can mentally anchor the pronunciation, particularly the stress, of words into students’ minds. Moreover, movements that accompany choral repetition can provide instructors with visual cues that indicate which students may be struggling to appropriately stress new vocabulary (Burri, Baker, & Acton, 2016). Noll (1999) suggests a variety of fun movements that might accompany choral repetition of vocabulary words, such as standing on the stressed syllables and sitting on the reduced syllables, raising one’s eyebrows on the stressed syllables and lowering them on the reduced syllables, or taking a big step on the stressed syllables and smaller steps on the reduced syllables. Burri, Baker, and Acton’s (2016) Rhythm Fight Club is a fun punching technique in which students punch on the stressed syllables and jab on the reduced syllables while chorally repeating. Gilbert (2008) advocates for using rubber bands to help students feel the stress of new words by pulling them taut on the stressed syllables and relaxing them on the reduced syllables. Regardless of which gestures teachers favor, by including some movements into choral repetition, deliberate practice is facilitated. Students can compare their movements with the movements of the group and teachers can provide targeted feedback in response to visual evidence.

2. Encourage Students to Monitor Their Own Pronunciation

One weakness of choral repetition is that in big classes, it can be difficult for students to hear their own pronunciation in order to critically evaluate it. Having students plug their ears and whisper as they chorally repeat is an excellent way to get around this drawback. Another extremely useful tool for pronunciation teachers who wish to help students become more thoughtful about their repetition of individual consonant and vowel sounds is a mirror. Having students listen to a model of the target sound (the teacher’s voice) and then look at their mouths as they repeat it can be very powerful. Students are often unaware of exactly what their mouths are doing as they try to pronounce unfamiliar or tricky sounds. For instance, students commonly struggle to pronounce the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds because they don’t place their tongues between their teeth. It is not unusual for teachers to provide good corrective feedback and a good model, but unless the students can see what they are doing wrong, the choral repetition becomes a reinforcement of improper mouth positioning.

3. Balance With Visual Support

According to Ehri (2002), the sight of a word triggers its pronunciation, and it is this pronunciation that has been stored in memory for convenient access along with the meaning of the word. If the sound/symbol relationship isn’t stored correctly in the brain, later retrieval may become problematic. Therefore, it is important for teachers to provide visual access to the words, either by writing them on the board, by providing students with a handout, or by displaying them on a slide. It is essential, however, that teachers not rush through the choral repetition of new words just because it feels repetitive or “easy” when students are essentially just reading the words. If students aren’t given the chance to repeat a new word several times, they may assign the wrong sounds to the word before it is transferred to their long-term memory, or it might not even be transferred at all.

4. Vary Choral Repetition

Though students rarely complain that choral repetition is boring, teachers may feel pressure to spice up the time spent on this kind of practice. There are several ways to make choral repetition more “fun” without decreasing its educational potential. Specifically, educators can divide the class into interesting groups for more varied repetition. For example, teachers of classes that have students from different places in the world can divide the class up by continent and have the students from Asia repeat, then the students from Africa repeat, then the students from Europe repeat. Alternatively, teachers can divide the class up by favorite ice cream flavors and have the students who like chocolate ice cream repeat, then the students who like vanilla ice cream repeat, then the students who like green tea ice cream to repeat, and so on. Classes can also be divided by clothing (have the students wearing jeans repeat, then the students wearing sweaters, then the students wearing sneakers) or items on students’ desks (have those who have pens on their desks repeat, then pencils, then erasers, then smartphones). The possibilities are endless.

Conclusion

Choral repetition is an essential part of language acquisition. Students need to repeat sounds, words and phrases many, many times before they truly “own” them and can use them unconsciously (Gilbert, 2008). According to Kjellin (n.d.), the adage practice makes perfect is actually true.

The robustness of long-term memories is directly related to the number of repetitions. An illustrative analogy is walking on a lawn: Tracks will arise where you walk sufficiently many times. Nowhere else. And faint tracks may easily become grassed again, unless rewalked on at times. (Kjellin, n.d., p. 3)

The key for turning choral practice from a boring, robotic activity into quality choral repetition is making tweaks to ensure the students are mindfully and critically rehearsing.

References

Baddeley, A., Gathercole, S., & Papagno, C. (1998). The phonological loop as a language learning device. Psychological Review, 105(1), 158–73.

Burri, M., Baker, A., & Acton, W. (2016). Anchoring academic vocabulary with a “hard-hitting” haptic pronunciation teaching technique. In T. Jones (Ed.) Pronunciation in the classroom: The overlooked essential (pp. 17–26). Alexandria, VA: TESOL Press.

Ehri, L. (2002). Phases of acquisition in learning to read words and implications for teaching. In R. Stainthorp & P. Tomlinson (Eds.) Learning and teaching reading. London, United Kingdom: British Journal of Educational Psychology Monograph Series II.

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

Gilbert, J. (2014). Myth 4: Intonation is hard to teach. In L. Grant (Ed.) Pronunciation myths. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Joe, A. (2010). The quality and frequency of encounters with vocabulary in an English for Academic Purposes programme. Reading in a Foreign Language, 22(1), 117–138.

Kjellin, O. (n.d.). Choral practice - The neurophysiological opportunist's way. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/2184625/Choral_Practice-
the_Neurophysiological_Opportunists_Way

Noll, M. (1999). American accent skills: Intonation, reductions and word connections. Oakland, CA: The Ameritalk Press.

Tamara Jones has taught in Russia, Korea, England, and Belgium, and she is currently the associate director of the English Language Center at Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland, USA. Tamara holds a PhD in education from the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. She is the editor and a chapter contributor of Pronunciation in the Classroom: The Overlooked Essential, a coauthor of Q: Skills for Success, Listening and Speaking 4, and the author of 50 Ways to Teach Pronunciation.