Teaching Pronunciation

The articulation of consonants and vowels and the discrimination of minimal pairs had shifted Emphasis on suprasegmental features such as stress and intonation (pitch)

Communicative Language Teaching Shifted the focus to fluency rather than accuracy, encouraged an almost exclusive emphasis on suprasegmentals.

Six realistic goals by (Dalton & Seidlhofer, 1994) 1. Prominence: how to make salient the important points we make 2. Topic management: how to signal and recognize where one topic ends and another begins 3.Turn-taking: when to speak, and when to be silent, how (not) to yield the floor to somebody else

Social meanings and roles: how to position ourselves vis-à-vis our interlocutors in terms of status, dominance/authority, politeness, solidarity/separateness Degree of involvement: how to convey our attitudes, emotions, etc. If we teach learners how to employ pauses, pitch movement, and stress to achieve the above communicative goals, then they will have attained a great deal of “functional communicability.”

Help learners gain confidence by design our materials around the situations learners will actually face, move carefully from controlled to free production in our practice activities, and provide consistent targeted feedback. Good learners attend to certain aspects of the speech they hear and then try to imitate it. Speech monitoring activities help to focus learners’ attention on such features both in our courses and beyond them.

Tradition teaching method Sounds syllables phrases and thought groups extended discourse Bottom-up approach of mastering one sound at a time Top-down approach, the sound system is addressed as it naturally occurs---in the stream of speech. Suprasegmental and segmental features can be addressed through a process akin to that a zoom lens.

Thought groups Pauses we use to divide our speech into manageable chunks Just as punctuation helps the reader process written discourse Pausing helps the listener to process the stream of speech more easily Less fluent learners: Pause too frequently Thought groups usually represent a meaningful grammatical unit.

I was speaking to him/on the phone yesterday. See p. 119

Prominence Within each though group, there is generally one prominent element, a syllable that is emphasized, usually by lengthening it and moving the pitch up or down: I was SPEAKing to him/ on the PHONE yesterday. P. 119

Intonation Pitch pattern

Rhythm The alternating of longer syllables and shorter syllables Rhythm is usually referred to as stress-timed Words that should be stressed: content words (nouns, main verbs, adjectives, and some adverbs), Do not rhythm on function words ( structure words, as articles, pronouns, auxiliary verbs and prepositions ) See P. 120

Reduced speech One way to weaken unstressed syllables is to shorten them Anther is to relax the mouth when articulating the vowels and to use less energy or muscular tension The most common reduced vowel is called schwa see p. 121

Linking

consonants Is phonetic symbols (alphabet) needed The articulation of a consonant varies like paper Clustering like facts

vowels Long vowel Short vowel Distinguished by tongue position (front/central/back), tongue and jaw (high/central/low), degree of lip rounding and the relative tension of the muscles involved (tense versus lax vowels)

Word stress

A communicative framework for teaching pronunciation 1. description and analysis For example: ed 2.Listening discrimination see p Controlled practice: at the beginning in more controlled activities, the learner’s attention should be focused almost completely on form.Poem, rhymes, dialogues, dramatic monologues can be used to engage learners.

4. Guided practice: not focus on form, the learners begin to focus on meaning, grammar, and communicative intent as well as pronunciation. For example: plural s