Teaching pronunciation

Practising pronunciation is an essential part of practising new language. We asked some teachers to tell us how they feel about teaching pronunciation and what they think is the most important thing about teaching pronunciation. Here’s what they said. I’d like to share some of my personal bad experience. I think when I started learning English at the age of 13, I didn’t put much emphasis on pronunciation. And I didn’t even know the knowledge of syllables– things like that. So when I tried to memorise the new words, I had to recite each letter, one after another. And that’s pretty hard. And it’s not easy to remember. It’s very, very difficult.

So when I started to teach, I just realised that that is quite important for me to have a very good pronunciation and to know the knowledge of how to remember these words. So I started to practise with a disc of pronunciation. And I think it helped me a lot. So it reflects that teachers should help students to practise very good pronunciation and also intonation and ways of how to learn these vocabularies. So I think the most important thing is to help the students to practise these pronunciations into some context. For example, not pronouncing [INAUDIBLE] word by word, but put the words into some context, like a poem or sounds or things like that, which can make sense.

It’s a lot to know, because unlike other languages, some English letters do not have equal identical sounds. So pronunciation symbols should be taught. But that is it should be taught, I have been doing that, with a lot of activities. Because if it’s ‘this is a monophthong, these are the diphthongs.’ And it will be a kind of a mathematical puzzles for the students. They don’t have to know about the articulation of phonetics, but the teachers must know, so then they can correct their mistakes. Teaching pronunciation is very important. But I reckon we should be careful not to really hammer our learners down into a particular pronunciation or trying to get them to really sound native.

We know that, in many languages, there will be a problem of learners not being able to pronounce such words. Or because such sounds and intonation or whatnot are not prevalent in a particular language. So we need to take that into consideration. But on the other hand, we should try to have them at least make sense to the rest of the world.