unit 6 teaching pronunciation

833，王蔷，教学发音的目的不是教学习者达到对本土口音的完美模仿，而只是让漏音者发出足够准确的发音，以便其他说话者容易和舒服地理解，涵盖了从目的、理论支持、教学目标到具体实践方法的多个方面。

unit 6 teaching pronunciation

• what
  • general knowledge of the sound system
    • classification of speech sounds
      • vowels
      • consonants
    • speech sounds in linguistic units
      • phoneme
      • allophone
• why
  • the role of pronunciation
    • debate
      • side A
        • students do not need to learn pronunciation because pronunciation will take care of itself as the students develop overall language ability
      • side B
        • failure in pronunciation is a great hindrance to language ability
    • conclusion
      • the leaners who have more exposures to english need less focus on pronunciation than those who only learn english in the class.
      • Adult leaners need more focus on pronunciation because they are more likely to substitute english sounds with sounds from their native language.
      • the teaching of pronunciation should focus on the ss'ability to identify and produce english sounds themselves.(pronunciation vs phonetics)
      • Ss should not be led to focus on reading and writing phonetic transcript of words, esp. for young studens.
      • Phonetic rules are helpful for ss to develop ability to cope with english pronunciation and they should be introduced at a suitable stage
      • stress and intonation are important and should be taught from the very begining
  • the goal of teaching pronunciation
    • the goal of teaching pronunciation is not to teach learners to achieve a perfet imitation of a native accent, but simply to get the learners to pronunce accurately enough to be easily and comfortably comprehensible to other speakers.
    • goal
      • consistency
        • the pronunciation should be smooth and natural
      • intelligibility
        • the pronunciation should be understandable to the listeners
      • communicative effiency
        • the pronunciation should help convey the meaning that is intended by the speaker
  • add
    • critical period hypothesis关键期
      • a biologically determined period of life when language can be acquired more easily and beyond which time language is increasing difficult to acquire.
• how
  • what aspects of pronunciation do we need to teach?
    • when talking about pronunciation, many people automatically think of sounds and phonetic symbols and rules(舒白梅音段）.
    • pronunciation is an umbrella term convering many aspects, beside sound and phone symbols ,such as stress, intonation, and rhythm（舒白梅超音段）.
    • Of course,these aspects are not isolated from each other, rather, they are interrelated
    • How to achieve good pronunciation?
      • practice makes it
      • bothe mechanical practice and meaningful practice are beneficial
  • the methods of practising sounds
    • it is importanta to combine drilling pronunciation exercises with more meaningful exercises that focus on whatever aspect of pronunciation is the focus of the lesson
    • practice exercise
      • focus on a sound
        • focus on a individual sounds especially those sound that are difficult to learn
      • preception practice
        • what is the goal of perception practice?
          • developing the students' ability to identify and distinguish between different sounds
        • examples
          • using minimal pairs (with one sound difference)
            • will/well, ship/sheep, light/night
          • which order
            • bear, tear, ear
          • same or different?
          • odd one out
          • completion
      • production practice
        • the goal of production practice is developing students' ability to produce sounds. Production practice of pronunciation varies from mechanical immitation to production in meaningful contexts
        • examples
          • listen and repeat
            • practice individual sounds, individual words, group of words, sentences
            • mechanical imitation
          • fill in the blanks
            • in sentences with words which contain certain sounds
          • make up sentences
            • using as many from the given words as possible
          • use meaningful contexe
            • to perform meaningful tasks such as role-play
          • use pictures
            • to produce meaningful language
          • use tongue twisters
            • to practice pronunciation
  • the methods of practising stress and intonation
    • stress
      • 2 types of stress
        • word-level stress
          • it is very important to stress the proper syllable in multi-syllabic words
          • the best strategy is to emphasize the importance of learning the stress as part of learning a word
        • phrase-level or sentence-level stress
          • each phrase or sentence has one syllable which receives greater or more prominent stress than the others
      • some phrase or sentences may have one stressed syllable, while others may have 5-6 stressed syllables
      • teaching methods
        • the most important thing in practising stress is making the students aware of where to stress the words or phrases.
        • methods
          • use gesture
            • clapping hands
            • using arm movements
          • use the voice
            • raise the voice to indicate stress
          • use the blackboard
            • underline the stress parts or write with colored chalks
    • intonation
      • intonation is used by native speakers to express meanings in many subtle ways, such as surprise,complaint,friendliness, threats
      • practising
        • use hand or arm movement to indicate change of intonation
        • use rising or falling arrows to mark intonation
        • draw lines to mark change of intonation
  • how can teachers help the students to improve pronunciation?
    • use individual, pair group and whole class work
    • use hands and arms to conduct practice
    • move around the classroom when doing choral practice
    • vary the criteria of 'good' to give students confidence
    • do articulation practice more than one
    • bring interests and variety to the practice
    • the main criteria for good pronunciation are consistency, intelligibility and communicative efficiency
    • make full use of demonstrations
    • try to use visual aids