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Having discussed the questionnaire with Lucia, we agreed that it is reasonable for a teacher to expect a student to be able to recognise each of the features of pronunciation mentioned in the questionnaire (that is, of course, once they have studied it in class). While not particularly affecting intelligibility, incorrect pronunciation of –ed endings is a real pet peeve of mine and bad habits should be dealt with as soon as possible. We agreed that all aspects of pronunciation in the questionnaire should be included in any future World Standard English. Even if lack of use of these features does not impede communication, they are vital components of English adding personality, accuracy, fluidity, animation and essentially life to the language.

In the articles were some great ideas for practicing these features in the classroom. Hughes’ word stress race is a nice way to get students actively thinking about word stress and trying out new ways of finding stress (humming, whistling, bouncing, clapping).

Arroub mentioned that when he introduces new language (phrasal verbs, collocations and idiomatic expressions) he always presents it in the way it would be heard (with connected speech). This is something I’m going to try start doing as I find with “real” listenings if students have listen out for a phrasal verb or expression they usually get half of it but don’t hear the rest. Integrating connected speech into target language could really help improve this.

Moreover, regarding listening activities, I agree with Hancock when he quotes John Field in that listenings are often more about testing than teaching. Students often understandably become disengaged and bored when they have a 10 question comprehension activity about a random topic they may have no interest in. Hancock’s suggestion of micro-listening could transform a one dimensional listening activity into bite-sized examples of connected speech or rhythm.

Almond shares a number of useful activities too. Though some of his warm up exercises may be a bit elaborate I think selecting a few and starting off a pronunciation lesson with them is a nice way of getting students relaxed and prepared to go for it a bit more. Perhaps incorporating elements of the phonemic chart could be a nice addition at this stage to get students more familiar with it and consciously thinking about the shape of their mouth and tongue placement for each sound.

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All of these articles were quite interesting and provided a lot to think about. As Hughes points out, on a number of issues there isn't really one clear 'right' way of doing things so I think the more I read, the more I think it's important to find a balance. Especially with lower levels living in English speaking countries there's a pragmatic element to what should be focused on. Almond's idea of giving students tasks that highlight funny pronunciation errors is novel but I'd prefer to just include this as an anecdote or encourage students to share a funny misunderstanding to break the ice in most cases and allocate more time and planning to immediate pronunciation concerns for all but Advanced or Proficiency levels. I agree with Bryan that a number of the ideas in these articles are very time-consuming to prepare and we should choose pragmatically what is 'learnable and teachable'. Arroub and Burgess both have nice, practicable tips and ideas on how to use listening scripts in class and do more specific listening practice rather than just the same old 'listen for gist/listen for specific information' stuff from exams. As has been mentioned below, one of the biggest obstacles students encounter is trying to understand people speaking English day to day outside of the classroom and this often crushes their confidence. It seems as if a kind of separate variety of English has developed among English learners and they speak the language and hence comprehend it collectively without weak forms, linking or use of contractions. On this point I'm still full of uncertainty. If as Hughes said, the onus is on native speakers to 'adjust their expectations' to a world where more people speak the language non-natively than natively, what is the extent to which, as teachers, we can judge or assess perceived inadequacies or errors. I guess for the moment it's important to just equip them with enough skills and understanding to keep them afloat and doggie paddling and then hope they'll eventually spend enough time in the water to learn how to swim well.

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All of these articles were quite interesting and provided a lot to think about. As Hughes points out, on a number of issues there isn't really one clear 'right' way of doing things so I think the more I read, the more I think it's important to find a balance. Especially with lower levels living in English speaking countries there's a pragmatic element to what should be focused on. Almond's idea of giving students tasks that highlight funny pronunciation errors is novel but I'd prefer to just include this as an anecdote or encourage students to share a funny misunderstanding to break the ice in most cases and allocate more time and planning to immediate pronunciation concerns for all but Advanced or Proficiency levels. I agree with Bryan that a number of the ideas in these articles are very time-consuming to prepare and we should choose pragmatically what is 'learnable and teachable'. Arroub and Burgess both have nice, practicable tips and ideas on how to use listening scripts in class and do more specific listening practice rather than just the same old 'listen for gist/listen for specific information' stuff from exams. As has been mentioned below, one of the biggest obstacles students encounter is trying to understand people speaking English day to day outside of the classroom and this often crushes their confidence. It seems as if a kind of separate variety of English has developed among English learners and they speak the language and hence comprehend it collectively without weak forms, linking or use of contractions. On this point I'm still full of uncertainty. If as Hughes said, the onus is on native speakers to 'adjust their expectations' to a world where more people speak the language non-natively than natively, what is the extent to which, as teachers, we can judge or assess perceived inadequacies or errors. I guess for the moment it's important to just equip them with enough skills and understanding to keep them afloat and doggie paddling and then hope they'll eventually spend enough time in the water to learn how to swim well.

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I found these articles really interesting and found useful ideas in some of them.  As Arroub points out, it is key to teach students to recognise features of connected speech as this can have a huge impact on their comprehensive skills. I sometimes find it difficult to help students improve their listening skill, particularly at higher levels where the problem might not be the lack of vocabulary or unfamiliar grammar structures but the features of connected speech that make it challenging for them to understand what the speakers are saying. I also agree with him when he says that students should be more exposed to “real” English as opposed to the “modified” version they are used to in the classroom – sometimes students are a bit shocked when they can barely understand a native speaker speaking at a normal pace. Burgess activity (‘I love you’) to practice connected speech is definitely something I’d like to try out in my classes.

I have also used Hughes technique for marking stress and students seem to find it very useful to recognise word and sentence stress. There are loads of fun activities in Hancock’s PronPacks that students at all levels enjoy doing without feeling demotivated and at the same time train themselves to recognise where the stress should go.

Having looked at the questionnaire and discussing it with Eva, we both agreed that we should teach students to recognise all the features covered in the questionnaire, but we wouldn’t necessarily expect students to produce all of them. However, we agreed that it is important for students to be able to stress content words; differentiate between long and short vowels; use the correct rising or falling intonation in question tags or wh- questions; and produce the correct pronunciation for -ed endings in regular and irregular verbs in the past.

All in all, I feel it’s key to give students as many tools and do as many memorable activities as we can to improve their pronunciation, this way they can work on it outside classroom and let them take control of their own learning to some extent.

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I really enjoyed the range of tips and information from these articles.

John Hughes’ word stress article had a few nice tips i.e. hum the stress and the word stress race worksheet is a great resource. In saying that I found his explanations of the stress tennis and the rubber band method to be slightly convoluted.

Debates and Dichotomies was, for me, the most interesting article of the bunch. It really got me thinking of the importance of intelligibility for the learner and not just about overall accuracy. Time spent on ‘achievable items’ is definitely something I need to bring into practice more. While I still believe accuracy is important for fluency I am beginning to realise I need to bring more ‘tolerance’ into the classroom and allow for slight pronunciation mistakes a bit more so as to not break the flow of activities and to avoid deflating the learner’s confidence.

Problems with Bowels brought up an interesting point, “make teaching memorable so they retrieve new language”. I whole heartedly agree but have to date primarily focused on musical approaches to teaching pronunciation to aid memory. Using humour is a great idea and I hadn’t thought of how to apply this. The warm up activities, if altered to be less elaborate, could work very well for me with younger learners. The ‘I love you game’ I feel is a great concept albeit a little out of reach for lower levels. Again this game could be altered to suit different levels i.e. longer sentences for lower levels. All in all this article sparked interest for me.

The micro listening topic was completely new territory for me. The almost step by step instructions in ‘In it up to your ears’ was really useful and makes me feel confident to try this approach.

I felt throughout reading the connect speech article that micro listening could also be hugely beneficial in almost all areas of connected speech. I also appreciated the tips Arroub gave on his own methods for teaching connected speech.

Finally the writing to speaking activity by Paul Burgess was brilliant and I fully intend to use this in the near future.

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I really enjoyed these articles. They highlighted things that I have perhaps overlooked in my pronunciation teaching, for example things as simple as how to mark stressed syllables on the board, in John Hughes' article on words stress. I also liked his tips on showing stress, like using the rubber band.

I also enjoyed Marc Almond's 'The Problem with Bowels'. I think using real examples of mistakes made by students is a great idea & I'm going to start collecting some myself! I have been teaching elementary and pre-intermediate this term & I agree with his comments on connected speech and sentence stress. I have been working on this a lot since starting the course, particularly with my elementaries. While they are not reproducing these patterns in free production yet, they are more aware of them & are able to unpack different sounds & the sentence meaning better now due to this practice. However, intonation is something that I have neglected, for the most part, with my classes. As Almond argues, it is very important for lower level learners to be more aware of this as a means of increasing their intelligibility. His "I love you" game is one that I will definitely try in class.

I found Mohammed Arroud's article very informative as well, in terms of breaking down the various parts of speech & how you can better teach them. As Fran has mentioned, I think it's a great article to have at your fingertips for a reminder or clarification.

Finally, with the dichotomies survey, I felt that all of the examples given were important to teach to students, if at least just to raise their awareness of them. I have done a lot of work on the -ed endings with both my elementary and pre-int classes lately & while it has been tough for some of them, I have noticed some of them self-correcting when they choose the wrong ending which is a big success for me. In terms of intelligibility though, I felt that they probably wouldn't all have a negative effect, particularly the ones concerning intonation in questions. I appreciate that it is more natural to use intonation correctly in questions but I am not totally convinced that it would make a student unintelligible if not used.

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I really responded to Mark Hancock's persuasive arguments about authentic audio, which I have really begun to experiment with since I've been teaching with an electronic board.

Marc Almond's article, 'The Problem with Bowels' was informative, but I must admit I think his phase 1 and phase 2 warm-ups are ridiculous. I think as language teachers we must put students at their ease through humour and make them feel confident, but this is just bizarre. I observed a teacher doing this elaborate warm-up in English Academy; and it was weird and uncomfortable for the students; his 'I love you' game seems much better.

I enjoyed John Hughes' article and will be using some of the activities he suggests. I also like the way his questionnaire made me think of intelligibility; which is something I feel is key to prioritise for students with regards to pronunciation.

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Some interesting articles here but what particularly stood out for me was both Mohammed Arroub and Mark Hancock talking about using authentic audio, which is something I hadn’t thought deeply about until recently. Students are, maybe all to often, babied in class with the course book audio and it doesn’t reflect the real-world English that they come across outside of the class.

In tutorials, I’m constantly asking them to listen to the radio to get used to everyday pronunciation and I’ll try this week to actually turn it on in class and try to make an activity out, or perhaps a pre-recorded podcast would work better.

Recently, I’ve been asking my students to record themselves doing dialogues. I
think it was mentioned in one of the other tasks about giving them time to practice this, and then they can give in their best effort. I’ve only heard back form a few students but it’s nice to see them working on it outside of the class. I’ll also try to get them to look at once sentence and try to produce it as close to the way they think a native speaker would say it, then record it, then play it to their classmate who has to guess what they are saying. I think this could be an interesting approach which would engage the students in autonomous learning.

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I always advise my students to leave their earphones at home and listen in to conversations they hear around them on the street, on public transport, and in cafes, and try to understand snippets of what they hear, what was said and how it was said. It amazes me that students often haven't considered walking around Dublin and taking advantage of all the speech that is going on around them. It can be so beneficial for their learning.

This came to mind as I was reading the articles. It seems a shame that often students only listen to how their teacher speaks here, when the opportunities to learn from native and non-native speakers are so many.

I think Mohammed Arroub is on to something with his focus on listening and complete activities, and his use of Harold Pinter dialogues. Marc Almond has some funny activities which work towards the idea that speaking another language involves being prepared to make a mistake. A student can learn to see the humour in the mistake without feeling humiliated.

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John Hughes’ article on word stress contains a couple of useful student-centred activities that are easy to set up and the word stress race board-game is something I think students would enjoy. His article and questionnaire on dichotomies made me realise how little I’ve explored intonation in the classroom, so that’s something I plan to change.

Mohammed Arroub’s piece on connected speech is really informative. When teaching this myself I leave out the intrusive ‘r’. I feel it’s a bit of a waste of time considering it’s very rarely heard. Identifying and practicing linking and elision in sentences is something I assign to students as controlled and freer practice, but I seldom treat it as a short task. I’m going to use his ‘mouth gymnastics’ warmer technique to inject connected speech into my lessons on a more regular basis. ‘Making Connections’ likewise has some good tips on teaching connected speech. His writing-to-speaking activity can be adapted to last the whole class or just to fill the spare fifteen minutes.

Mark Almond’s ‘Problem with Bowels’ displays a lot of humorous ways to teach pronunciation. The warm-up activities are funny and I like his ideas for tone, intonation, pace and volume – I’m going to try this in the classroom but rather than using ‘I love you’ as the key sentence I’ll get students to select words at random which will hopefully make it more entertaining!

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There are many good activities to try out in this section. Something that I tried this week was the ‘I love you’ dialogue activity (Mark Almond) and it worked quite well: they were more aware of intonation, rather than meaning. However, they were confused when they realised they could only say three words and felt a bit ridiculous (which I don’t think is a bad thing, but some students do). The minimal pairs activity looks like a good warmer: we could print them out, cut them up and use them as a pair-matching activity.

I see Arroub’s article like a good summary to have with me when connected speech comes up in some sentences, even if it’s not the focus of the lesson. Integrating connected speech into other activities is something that I would like to get better at, as to be honest it is a quite new teaching element for me.

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I enjoyed Mark Almond talking about using humour when teaching pronunciation and I am a firm believer in humiliating yourself when you can in the classroom, it takes a lot of tension out of what can be a stigmitising ordeal for some students. Hancock and Paul Burgess' articles on authentic speech were interesting but the exercises suggested were by Hancock's  own admission quite time consuming in terms of preparation.

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Bryan

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Lots of great articles here. They really helped when looking at ways to observe word stress. I’ll definitely try 1 - Humming the word to show the stress - focuses on stress rather than meaning, 2 - Count syllables with fingers or claps. I probably won’t use the cuisenaire rods - but  using different squares of coloured paper (with the red square showing stress) also works well. This is more kinesthetic too!

I really enjoyed Arroub’s Connected Speech article especially with the focus on assimilation and change of sounds such as -
Send you - senja  /dz/ d and a y - j
Start your - starture - /ch/    t and a y - ch
T falls away in superlative - biggest city in the word - biggis city in the world
Nicest man i know, nices man i know , fastis animal. I actually pointed this out when we were listening to R  Kelly’s ‘The world’s greatest’ song! I played the chorus back a few times and asked - what do you hear - ‘the world’s greatest’ or ‘the world’s greates’? They all heard the latte!
4.  The Glutteral stop - double tt’s become d sounds, ‘I’m gedding bedder’ at English! I’ve seen a fab activity on the PCD teachers board which shows this - I look forwards to trying it out this week.

Regarding the debates and dichotomies questionnaire. Shamefully I realise I need to focus on these basic pronunciation steps more in class. As I am teaching a pre Int - I often find them mistaking the past tenses of d/id/ and /t/ - as the questionnaire points out this affects the intelligibility in conversation. I’ll be doing that in a class tomorrow. Another almost vital step would be the different pronunciation of the 3rd person in present tense being pronounces /s/, /iz/  or /z/ depending on the sound before. This will also introduce the past sounds well as students will focus on the sounds rather than reading the words which often are mispronounced. ‘Teacher I work- ed at the weekend’ -  Ahhhhhh!!!

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One article I don't entirely agree with was John Hughes talking about standard/variations in terms of the classroom voice and material used. I understand that the much derided RP is spoken by a tiny anachronistic bunch of Daily Mail readers in the south-east of England and that language learners are unlikely to have much interaction with them. Nevertheless, students do have their own preconceptions about what they regard as 'good pronunciation' and that is often some kind of RP. I think it's interesting to discuss this as it relates to prejudices and linguistics, and you have to make students aware of the differences of native speakers, but where do you start from if not there. It should be a base from which you learn but it doesn't have to be an aspiration. I'm from England if you hadn't guessed.

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I found these articles interesting and illuminating on areas of weakness in my own pronunciation teaching. John Hughes gives some good advice on different L1 groups when it comes to word stress and there is a good dictionary game for higher level learners. Of particular interest to me was Mohammad Arroub's article on understanding fast connected speech from native speakers. My students often express frustration at their gap in understanding between the English used in the controlled environment of the classroom and the English they hear outside of school. I always highlighted these differences to students but I feel I have some more definitive answers for them now in relation to assimilation/ omission of /t/ in AE/ glottal stop/ intrusive /r/ and also that 'opportunistic teaching' of pronunciation, i.e. dealing with a pronunciation problem as it occurs in the class, is a ggod idea.