Teaching Pronunciation
INTRODUCTION
In order to understand better English on both spoken and written, the most valuable gifts offered the pupils is pronunciation. However, as a teacher, sometimes it is a bit difficult in contributing this particular gift. It can be a challenge to the teachers when they face the problems such as the pupils’ pronunciation habits are not easy to change and it is also hard to understand and make a correction of the wrong pronunciation made by the pupils themselves. A consideration of learners’ pronunciation errors and of how can this be successful communication is a useful basis on which to assess why it is important to deal with pronunciation in the classroom. When a learner says, for example, soap in a situation, such as a restaraunt where they should have said soup, the inaccurate production of a phoneme can lead to misunderstanding (at least on the part of the waitress). A learner who consistently mispronounces a range of phonemes can be extremely difficult for a speaker from another language community to understand. This can be very frustrating for the learner who may have a good command of grammar and lexis but have difficulty in understanding and being understood by native speaker. Another example of mispronunciation: when a speaker or a reader replaces one phoneme with another he unintentionally uses quite a different word , in this way altering the sense of what he wanted to say. For instance, white instead of wide, it instead of eat, pot instead of port, etc. The inaccurate use of suprasegmental elements, such as stress and intonation, can also cause problems. For example the following request was made by a Turkish leraner in a classroom. Do you mind if I open the window?
Here we notice how the sentence stress is on the [əʊ] of open. As it was a first request, one might have expected the first syllable of window to have been the most prominent, rather then the first syllable of open. Had the teacher
In order to understand better English on both spoken and written, the most valuable gifts offered the pupils is pronunciation. However, as a teacher, sometimes it is a bit difficult in contributing this particular gift. It can be a challenge to the teachers when they face the problems such as the pupils’ pronunciation habits are not easy to change and it is also hard to understand and make a correction of the wrong pronunciation made by the pupils themselves. A consideration of learners’ pronunciation errors and of how can this be successful communication is a useful basis on which to assess why it is important to deal with pronunciation in the classroom. When a learner says, for example, soap in a situation, such as a restaraunt where they should have said soup, the inaccurate production of a phoneme can lead to misunderstanding (at least on the part of the waitress). A learner who consistently mispronounces a range of phonemes can be extremely difficult for a speaker from another language community to understand. This can be very frustrating for the learner who may have a good command of grammar and lexis but have difficulty in understanding and being understood by native speaker. Another example of mispronunciation: when a speaker or a reader replaces one phoneme with another he unintentionally uses quite a different word , in this way altering the sense of what he wanted to say. For instance, white instead of wide, it instead of eat, pot instead of port, etc. The inaccurate use of suprasegmental elements, such as stress and intonation, can also cause problems. For example the following request was made by a Turkish leraner in a classroom. Do you mind if I open the window?
Here we notice how the sentence stress is on the [əʊ] of open. As it was a first request, one might have expected the first syllable of window to have been the most prominent, rather then the first syllable of open. Had the teacher