General features of teaching pronunciation. Teaching pronunciation is important not just because it is necessary to communicate one’s ideas clearly. Articulation movements accompany the process of using the language  not  only  when  a  person  is  speaking  but  also  during  listening,  reading  and  writing.  Hidden articulation movements were registered when a person seemed silent just listening to somebody else talking or when reading a text. The more difficult the cognitive task, the more obvious become sound articulations. Language articulation is thus closely linked to the language.  If  the  hidden articulation  movements  are  surprised  (in  experiments  the  subjects  are  asked  to  perform  some  movements with  their  tongue while  doing  a  thinking  task),  the subjects  find  it  difficult  to  perceive  the  words. Pronouncing one’s thought or at least making hidden articulations facilitates the process. People often resort to pronouncing words while reading a text when they find the text ambiguous.

Explotary Task:

The task is done by a pair of students. One attempts to solve silently the two verbal problems given below.  The  other  observes  the process  and  reports    on  the  emergence  of  slight  articulation  movements. When and why does articulation appear?

Problem 1 Elevenmen  are  crawling  along  a  green     lawn in a straight row. What are they doing?

Problem 2 John  is  taller  than  Paul  but  is  shorter  than Pauline. Who is the tallest in the family?

Speech sound articulation is important not only to pronounce the words but also to recognize and to spell them. Russian learners of English often mistake the [t] sound for [ch] sound, believing that the words “teacher” is pronounced as [chicher], and the structure “it is”, is pronounced [ichis]. Mistakes in orthography can also be traced to erroneous pronunciation.  The following words can be both pronounced and spelt by the learners as [instinct].

The communicative approach since 1980 holds that pronunciation is important for teaching the language for the purposes of communication.  The  studies  of  the  importance  of  sounds  and  intonation  have  shown  that intonation  appears  to  be  more  important  appears  to  be  more  important  for  communication  than  speech sounds.  Mistakes  in  intonation  cause  more  comprehension  problems  than  mispronounced  phonemes. Mastering the pronunciation of foreign languages presents great difficulties for the learners. Uzbek learners of  English  can  find  it  difficult  to  distinguish  between  the  sounds  in  the  words “bed” and “bad”. They can equally  find  it  difficult  to  distinguish  the  sound  in  the  words “ ten” and “tan”, etc. The reason for the difficulty is that Uzbek students of English do not have in their native tongue the distinction between open, half-open  and closed vowels, as well as between short and long vowels (as in “bin” and  “bean”) and monophtongs and diphthongs (as in “pen” and “pain”). English rhythm and stress pattern of sentences are also hard to master for the Uzbek learners.  Uzbek speech is less rhythmical.  Uzbek words do not have a primary and secondary stress.  Uzbek learners of English are no exception in their  difficulties.  Japanese student find it next to impossible to perceive the difference between “rice” and “lice”. Thai students find English intonation confusing because in the Thai language the word “haa” said with the falling tone means “five”, while the same word pronounced with the rising tone means “to look for”.

People reasons for the learners making errors in pronouncing the foreign sounds are that a particular sound may be absent in the mother tongue.  A  sound  may  exist  in  the  mother  tongue  but  with  a  different articulation. Similar native sounds may not distinguish the meaning as in the foreign language (e.g. long and short vowels). Learners may mispronounce the sound because they may mishear it. Conversely, the learners can mishear the sound because they mispronounce it. That is why the first thing that needs to be done is to check  that  the  learners  can  hear  and  identify  the  sounds  that are  to  be  taught.  After  the  learners  have acquired the sound-symbol correspondence, they may in some languages immediately decode any given word or  write  down  any  spoken  word  without  much  hassle.  In the English language it is not so simple.  This happens because in the English language the words have long changed their pronunciation but their original spelling still remains the same. The English orthographic system functions on the “conservative principle” while pronunciation appears to be more dynamic and changes with time.

The goal of teaching pronunciation is not to make the learners sound like native speakers of English. Only few highly gifted and motivated individuals can achieve it. A more realistic approach is to enable the learners  to  pronounce  the  language without  detracting  from  the  ability  to  comprehend  the  message.  This approach to teaching pronunciation is called approximating.  The  target  of  teaching  pronunciation  is  to develop  in  learners  phonetic  competence,  which  is  the  knowledge  of  the  English  phonetic  means  such  as phonemes, syllable formation, word stress and intonation.

Phonetic competence includes the knowledge of how speech sounds (phonemes) are used in actual speech production.  This includes elisions (absence of sounds as in “Chris/t/mas”) and assimilation (where one sound merges in the next sound as in “hambag” standing for “handbag”). This is called “modification of phonemes in connected speech”.  There are some typical modifications of phonemes in connected oral speech. If these words are spelt as they are pronounced they will look like: “GrapeBritain” (Great Britain), “stapement” (statement), “lasyear” (last year), “aspecs” (aspects), etc. One of the reasons that the phonemes merge together in oral speech is that it saves speakers from making articulation efforts.

There are two kinds of knowledge in mastering English pronunciation.  One type of    knowledge is intuitive, which is a language feeling.  The  other  type  of  knowledge  is  analytic  and  is  based  on  the knowledge of articulation.

Techniques  for  teaching  pronunciation  that  have  traditionally  been  used  and  are  still  being  used  in instructed   settings.   The   traditional   approach   to   teaching   pronunciation   that   still   survives   is   the “pronunciation drill”. Drills are still very popular and there are a number of reasons for that. Drills engage the students in narrowly defined tasks. This provides emotional security for the learners and teachers. Drills are relatively easy to perform. They guarantee in most cases the immediate result of mastering the learning material.  In  other  words  a  drill  works  and  that  is  what  matters.  It  is  evident  that  one  can’t  master pronunciation  of  the  foreign  language  without  some  form  of  repetitive  drilling.  Repetition can be by the whole class, individually in the fixed order, slow tempo and fast tempo, repetition in small groups, etc.

Listen and imitate. Students listen to the models provided by the teacher and imitate them.

E.g. 1: back, lack, lap, tap, map, cat....(phoneme [a] in the closed syllable).

E.g. 2: Why Willie, why wink widely, weep wildly, whoop weirdly...? (Every word begins with [w]).

Repetitious exercise train the learners to pronounce long chains of words and/or phrases. E.g. lunch,  much,  crunch,  such,  touch....  .  At  lunch  I  like  to  crunch  so  much  and  touch  what  I  can  crunch. Analogy exercises consist of filling in the gaps in word chains on the analogy. E.g. My loved one is so near, and dear, but I .......(fear) that he will not come here. 

Tongue  twisters(phrases  that  are  difficult  to  say  without  a  sound  mistake  because  of  the  sounds interesting with each other). E.g. “Swans swam in swarm and swiftly swerved to swallow the sweet worm” or She sells sea shells on the sea shore and she sells are sea shells.

Contextual minimal pair drills. A situation setting is used to distinguish between similar words. E.g. the situation is that a blacksmith is shoeing a horse. What sentence do you hear? “The blacksmith (a / hits, b /heats) the horseshoe.”

Visual aids. Devices such as charts, pictures, mirrors, real things are used to enhance pronunciation training.

Tasks with interjections. Tasks with interjections are used to develop in learners the ability to use phonetic means in the given situational circumstances. There are quite a few phonemes that can be used in speech as “interjections”, i.e. short exclamatory words. The learners are given a situational phrase, to which they react using an interjection with the correct articulation and intonation.

Reproduction exercises. They are designed for developing pupils’ pronunciation habits, i.e.  Their ability to articulate English sounds correctly and to combine sounds into words, phrases and sentences easily enough to be able to speak and comprehend while listening. The following techniques can be recommended.  Record the following conversation and play it for students. Ask students to guess who the participants are and what the setting is.

He: Ready? ↑

She: No. ↓

He: Why? ↓

She: Problems. ↓

He: Problems? ↑

She: Yes. ↓

He: What? ↓

She: Babysitter. ↓

After the students have figured out what is going on; the teacher plays the conversation again. This time the teacher puts the dialogue on the board and draws arrows next to each utterance. Then the students pronounce each word with the teacher. The teacher checks the rise or fall in pitch. The  material  used  for  reproduction  exercises  or  drills  should  be connected  with  the  topic  or  unit  of lesson pupils study. For example, to teach students the correct pronunciation of [w] the rhyme can be used: “Why do you cry Willy? Why? Why, Willy, why?” If students are taught how to pronounce  [d]  they following proverb can used: A friend in need is a friend indeed.

The  teacher  may  take  poems,  some  useful  expressions,  short sentences,  rhymes, geographical  and proper  names,  international words  as  materials  for  pronunciation  drills. Pronunciation  is  a  skill  that  should be  developed  and  perfected throughout  the  whole  course  of  learning  the  language.  That is  why the  teacher should use pronunciation drills during every lesson, irrespective of the stage of instruction.