Fun activities: learning the sounds of North American English Sandanona Conference May 25, 2009 Elisabeth Yesko

Pachuca, México The most important perspective for deciding what to teach: look at your students, their problems with English their future needs in the way of English language skills desires of the learners must also be considered, and many adult learners desire explicit attention to pronunciation (Pennington, page 218)

Most important pronunciation difficulties for second language learners Those which occur most frequently: pronunciation of a particular phoneme (e.g. /r/ as /rr/ mispronunciation of a common morpheme (e.g. past tense –ed as [əd] after voiceless stops, as in worked, stopped) mispronunciation of a common lexical item (e.g. she, can’t)

Those which are the most serious, i.e., have the greatest effect on intelligibility stress placed on wrong words or syllables of words misleading intonation (e.g. high pitched intonation on old information; a sharp rise or fall, or a separate intonation pattern on each word) loss of one or more final consonants (e.g. in can’t, sent, dusk) (Pennington, page 256)

In Mexico, English is not yet a medium of instruction in the public schools. Spanish is vital for anyone wishing to read and write. Just as in English, as well as other languages, Spanish has considerable dialectal variation and, as a result, speakers of different dialects may have different pronunciation problems. (Avery, Ehrlich 149) Please see the following website for excellent English pronunciation practice:

not the same sounds Having developed an understanding of how my students pronounced consonants /b/ and /v/…..the letter ‘v’ is used in Spanish spelling, the sound /v/ does not exist. In initial position, Spanish speakers may pronounce the English /v/ sound as /b/. Spanish speakers may not aspirate the voiceless stops /p/, /t/, and /k/ in word-initial position.

Index Card Games for ESL Teachers at the School for International Training compiled by Raymond C. Clark published by ProLingua Associates. Photocopyable sample games: vowels and diphthongs, consonants, regular past tense endings, regular plural endings, minimal pairs, for example, “ship/sheep, lip/leap, bit/beat”, and syllable stress

Sound and Spell /k/ /ch/ /sh/ keep child ship neck inch wash /-t/ /-d/ /-id/ asked lived needed

Identification and correction of specific pronunciation problems in teaching American English Pronunciation As teachers of English, it behooves us to understand our learners English that for example Arabic does not have a /p/ sound and learners may substitute /b/ for /p/. Thus, ‘Pompeii’ sounds like ‘Bombay’. While Japanese has a /b/ sound, it has no /v/ and Japanese learners will often substitute /b/ for /v/, producing ‘berry’ instead of ‘very’.

Word stress is something that requires getting used to. Undoubtedly, everyone has issues with stress! Whether your students are Spanish speakers, Chinese, French or Hindi, Remember that in English, stressed vowels are both lo-o-o-onger and louder.

Pronunciation Practice Activities: A resource book for teaching English pronunciation by Martin Hewings, published by Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers. Stress in noun-verb pairs Focus: To help identify different stress patterns when the same word is used as a noun or verb Level: Advanced Time: 20 minutes Preparation: Student Handout

Reference books Avery, P. and Ehrlich, S Teaching American English Pronunciation: Oxford. Celce-Murcia, M. and Brinton, D. and Goodwin, J Teaching Pronunciation: A Reference for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages: Cambridge. Clark, R Index Card Games for ESL: ProLingua Associates. Hewings, M Pronunciation Practice Activities; A resource book for teaching English pronunciation: Cambridge. Pennington, M Phonology in English Language Teaching: Longman.

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