The videos that I found most useful in this section were the BBC Teachers’ Room ones. They were clear, practical, and added a bit of fun to the subject. I find it particularly interesting to see that there are different methods to teach certain aspects of pronunciation, and the fact that the hosts also mentioned (and offered solutions to) some little problems that a teacher might encounter helped even more. 

The more theoretical videos, like the elt-training ones, are also good tools for teachers, as they provide clear examples of how important intonation and word stress are in English. I also liked how the host compared English to tonal and syllable timed languages. This could be an idea to integrate in the classroom, especially if there are students coming from languages that have different patterns. The only element of doubt I have is about the delivery of the videos, to be honest it was hard to follow them the whole way through. 

A video that I found a bit puzzling was the ‘stop saying’ one. I understand that the intention is to help learners pronounce difficult words correctly, but the focus on saying ad’vertisment instead of adver’tisement wasn’t helpful in my opinion. As a student, I would probably interpret the host’s observations as a rule (‘don’t say this version, because it’s weird’), not as a joke referencing American accents. 

Fran 

As I said in the previous task I do sometimes speak like a robot and try to bring awareness to intonation to students but these videos have giving me some good ideas for practice for students which I’ll try out in class . 

 On stress, I already use one of the techniques in class with the sentence: I didn’t say that we should kill her. Students definitely find this one fun. I see it’s up on the board in the teachers’ room now so I’m not the only one doing this. When it comes to word stress, I generally underline the stressed syllable but now I realise it would be better to use circles to show all the syllables. 

 I also liked the speaking like a child activity with a sentence like: want new iPhone. This could really help students to understand the stress-time nature of English. Reading a short text is great as well because you can first focus on the stress but then do the weak forms. 

 In terms of intonation, I really like the idea of using lists to show turn taking. I can imagine giving a really long pause with rising intonation and making the students wait. I think the humming is a fantastic way too to get away from the words and focus on meaning. And finally, repeating sentences and guessing the emotion seems like a very fun way to teach it. Maybe a game with two piles of cards could work, one being sentences and the other being emotions. The student has to say the sentence and the others have to guess their emotion. This is something I’ll definitely try soon. 

I’ve tried a number of activities with my students and, so far, they have enjoyed them all. One activity they seemed to have a fun with was one where they had to do a detective/witness role-play and stress different words in the sentence depending on the question they are asked. It’s in one of the PronPacks and I’ll definitely use it again with other levels. I’ve also used the sentence Graham mentioned (I didn’t say we should kill her) when I saw it up on the board in the teacher’s room and thought it was great to raise awareness of the importance of stress. I also asked students to write a short dialogue where they are talking to a sleepy/distracted receptionist, and they have to work on contrastive stress to correct people, etc. 

What I’d like to include more of in the future is extra practice on intonation; the BBC video had a lot of good tips - especially humming, using lists, or saying sentences trying to convey different emotions. What I think is great about these activities is that they can be used with all levels, as there is no focus on the language itself or grammar, but purely intonation. 

 

Teaching students how sounds are produced from an early stage (perhaps pre-intermediate level) could give the learners a head start when approaching more detailed elements of pronunciation i.e. connected speech.  In my opinion, how sound is produced is part of the foundations of learning a new language so it’s very useful that the teacher has a good understanding of it. 

Being a newly qualified teacher myself the only advice I could offer other new teachers is to experiment with different drilling techniques as soon as you begin teaching. The success of different techniques not only varies from student to student but I feel it also varies from teacher to teacher. Personally I feel the standard approach of model – drill chorally 3 times – drill singularly 3 times is a reliable approach to drilling new vocabulary. With elements of connected speech I think there should be a mix of techniques applied to different areas. For example with rapid speech, I feel the use of reading scripts of popular poems/music repetitively can work well for familiarising the students with the flow of words in rapid speech. As students already know the song/poem their concern doesn’t lie with the vocabulary but rather with the speed in which they can produce the language. For intrusion I feel modelling the links in slow-mo as seen in the ‘Sound like a native speaker’ video could be really useful. Visually, students can see very clearly how the shape of your mouth is producing the sounds. Adding rhythm to drilling and having learners use their feet/hands to tap along with the rhythm of the language being taught can work well with musical and visual learners and can be a fun approach to drilling. 

Over all my advice would be to experiment and find techniques you feel comfortable with and enjoy using.

When identifying stresses, I use my fingers to count and mark it on the board using circles. Today I got my elementary students to hum and it really helped some people. By humming the words first, they were able to hear the stress properly, enabling them to tackle the pronunciation with more confidence.   I find the ‘child talk’ technique really effective for rhythm. It’s quite entertaining, too. Likewise with volume variation – it injects a bit of fun into drilling. 

Shadow reading is something I could see being really useful in the classroom. Usually students just read sentences monotone, but getting them to highlight the stressed and unstressed words would surely change this. Hopefully analysing and injecting rhythm into a longer text would encourage students to treat lone sentences the same. I agree that it’s hard to teach intonation, as it differs from country to country and in some it doesn’t exist at all. 

Shaneen

By far the most informative were the BBC Teacher’s Room videos. They included great ideas that could be easily incorporated into class. A useful tip which I’m going to start doing in class is alternating different methods for finding word stress. I think this benefits different types of learners such as kinaesthetic and helps those (including myself) who sometimes find it difficult to identify the stressed syllable. Humming, whistling, clapping and bouncing are all diverse ways of helping students identify and remember word stress. In addition to this, normally I mark the stressed syllable by just underlining it in a different colour. However having seen how clearer one big circle and smaller circles are for marking all syllables, I’m going to start using this method. 

The Teacher’s Room on intonation had great ideas too like creating and annotating dialogues with emotions (there’s a nice exercise on this in the Film, TV and Music book using movie quotes in the teacher’s room). I’ve done activities similar to Correct Me to practise contrastive stress. Students really enjoyed them and were able to articulate the appropriate stress accurately. And maybe for lower levels the “list” intonation for practising rising and falling tone could be used with the “I went to the supermarket yesterday and I bought a…..” memory game.

Although the BBC videos outshone the rest, that’s not to say there weren’t some good ideas in the others. In the Sentence Stress 2 video, she talks doing dictations to draw attention to strong and weak forms. She said it’s a good idea to get students to count the words they hear. I think this is really useful for doing listening activities. Generally content words are where the answer lies, but sometimes the weaker forms are just as important. The example she gives is “If I’d known you were coming I’d have baked a cake.” Did she bake a cake? For this type of question the weaker words are essential. I think dictating and counting could get students used to listening out for both. Shadow reading and the child talk activity could be a good way of working on this too. 

Stress and intonation is an aspect of pronunciation that I have neglected in the past. However through doing the pronunciation course, it has become apparent just how essential it is to the English language. Slowly I’m beginning to incorporate more practice into my classes and I’m going to continue working on it by trying out some of the activities shown in the videos.

The reason I like it so much is because there is so many ways to make it fun. I also love seeing a student have the ‘aha’ moment when they’ve successfully produced language like a native. 

These videos were great for me as I’m always on the lookout for more activities and approaches to teaching all aspects of pronunciation with the hopes that by the end of this course I’ll have a clear idea of what works, what I am personally good at presenting and what the students enjoy. 

I am very eager to experiment with drilling sentence stress. The sentence stress 2 video had some great tips in there to vary the drilling. Vary speed, volume, do mumble drills and chain drills. These all sound like a fun challenge for the students and also have genuine merit.

The BBC videos are excellent as always. The intonation video from the BBC contained a great humming dialogue activity that I will definitely try especially with my younger learners. I already use the approach they mentioned of getting learners to repeat the same sentence in different ways while their partner guess their emotion. I find this actively great and it is brilliant for getting students to bond by acting silly together.

I intend to integrate more work on stress and intonation by continuing to gather activities and feedback from other teachers. 

 

I have done quite a bit of work with students on stress already and they have responded well. I would like to maybe use some of the different methods in the BBC video for counting syllables firstly and then figuring out the stress. I also want to think about the best way to mark the stress on the board. I tend to swap from underlining the stress to drawing circles over the stressed words. I need to make sure there is some more uniformity to this, while making sure it is clear to the students what I am marking out.

 

I also liked the idea of finding rules, like the stress on the first syllable of rebel [n] and the second of rebel [v]. Students always want a rule! I would just be wary of making it clear that this is not a totally hard and fast rule, as is always the case with English.

 

I did a lesson on tonal stress with my class and found it hard to convey the difference between stress/intonation and just shouting the words, particularly for some Chinese students. The reason for this was explained very well in the CELTA intonation video. I want to do some more work on this in the future, as it is very important for them to grasp. It also needs some sensitivity so that students feel comfortable, as it isn’t a natural instinct for many of them. I am going to try to keep it light-hearted and try using some dialogues and ask students to guess the emotion that their partner is trying to convey. I’ll also try to find some patterns that students can grasp as an introduction to intonation. 

Stress and intonation are things that I really want to integrate to my classes, as it emerges in class as well as in focused practices.