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Diagnosing pronunciation problems

Quotes from online teachers talking about ways that they diagnose learners' pronunciation issues in an online environment.
8.3
So if you’re going to teach speaking, obviously, your student will do lots of speaking in your session, which is great. You can also get them to do lots outside the session as well. So making, for example, YouTube videos is really popular. You can ask your student to make short videos on particular topics, send them to you. And that’s great. If your student wants to work on individual sounds - so a lot of students quite like, yeah, seeing their improvement on particular words that are difficult. A good thing to do is identify specific areas. Research your students’ language background to realise, OK, they speak this language. They will probably have this difficulty.
47.4
Look out for that difficulty, and then direct them to something like there’s a really good app, Sounds Foundations, I think it is. And they can practise the pronunciation of sounds on that.

The first step to helping learners with their pronunciation is diagnosing issues they may have in relation to sounds, word stress, sentence stress and intonation.

Task

Watch Mary talking about ways to help learners with their pronunciation. Then, read the quotes from online teachers saying how they diagnose their learners’ pronunciation issues. What different methods are mentioned? (You can click on the image to expand the quotes.)

Screen reader accessible version of the quotes

Check your answers.

Reflect and share

Which method for diagnosing pronunciation problems mentioned in the quotes do you think is the most useful? Go to our poll and add your answer. You can view the results here. If you choose Other, let us know what that is in the comments.

This article is from the free online

Teaching English Online

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FutureLearn - Learning For Life

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