Getting started teaching pronunciation: my favourite activities

Teaching pronunciation can be a very fun part of teaching ESL…when you have a few good ideas up your sleeve. However, coming across these ideas and knowing if they will work in class is the hard part. Over the years of teaching, I have developed a bank of tried and tested activities that I like to pull out at a moment’s notice. Have fun trying them and let me know how you get on!

1.Using an online dictionary (phonemes and IPA)

It might not seem exciting or groundbreaking, but pointing out to learners the pronunciation audio button in an online dictionary (such as Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries), is a very helpful starting point! No longer will they have to guess and hope for the best or come to you with every new word they learn: they can find the answers themselves. Highlight this feature to them and have them practise locating words that they frequently use but may not know how to pronounce.

2.Big and small circles (word stress)

Word stress is an often under-taught element of pronunciation that can cause significant communication problems if not mastered correctly. When teaching word stress, it is useful to check the phonetic form in the dictionary, and identify the primary (and possibly secondary) stress, which is indicated with apostrophes. Students can then ‘draw’ the word using circles to represent the syllables. For instance, the word ‘communicate’ can be represented by: ‘oOoo’ (with the primary stress falling on the second syllable).

For a complete workshop on Word stress, check out my sample lesson plan and materials here.

3.Elastic bands (word stress)

Another great way to visualise word stress is to use elastic bands. Simply hold an elastic band and stretch it according to the number of syllables in the word, stretching it harder for the primary stress.

4.Annotate a transcript (phonemes, stress, intonation, chunking)

This activity works well for practising a range of pronunciation elements.

Choose a clip (video or audio only) about a topic that interests your class. Make sure it is not too challenging in terms of grammar and vocabulary. Provide students with the transcript, formatted in large font and wide spacing. Have them listen to the clip and mark in whatever element of pronunciation you are focussing on - it can be pauses, intonation patterns (rise and fall of voice), and phonemic sounds (eg. ‘circle all the instances of the sound /i:/ - remember this won’t always correlate to the same spelling). Then ask students to read the transcript back to each other in pairs, being careful to imitate the speaker’s pronunciation.

5.Use the mirror (phoneme awareness and production)

One way of encouraging awareness of how to produce tricky sounds is to use a mirror or the selfie view on a camera. Although students can initially resist this idea (after all, sticking out your tongue to produce a ‘th’ can be a little embarrassing!), it is a sure-fire way to check whether your mouth and tongue are in the right position. After some initial reluctance, they usually find this quite an amusing and effective activity!

6.Change the emphasis (sentence stress)

A fun way of highlighting the impact of changing the stress in a sentence is to write a sentence on the board (eg. ‘this is the house that Jack built). Read it out to students and change the emphasis each time, (eg. ‘this is the house that Jack built’ - ‘this is the house that Jack built’.) Ask them to identify the impact of the change. What is the sentence implying? (eg. ‘this is the house, not the flat that he built’). Have students repeat this back after you. You can follow this up by having them work on their own sentences in pairs.

For more tips and resources for getting started teaching pronunciation, check out my previous blog post.