Phonology is the science that concerns and
studies the sounds of a language. Is it important to know this? Shall we teach
phonology to our students? It seems to me that as teachers phonology is a
must-know feature
of the language. We must know how to pronounce all the phonemes from the international
phonemic alphabet, we must know about the schwa sound and so on. However, teaching the
language in such a technical way can make demotivate our students, so again as
in grammar we must be wise when teaching pronunciation.
English as a Foreign Language Students must distinguish the
sounds of the different words and also they must be aware that there are
different accents
and dialects
in English. Thus, in class we can use videos or TV programmes from the USA or
the UK to raise awareness among our students about the different accents in the
target language.
Where can we get them? A great tool is the downloading software “uTorrent”. There
you can find a lot of TV series for free and in English such as: Malcom,
Friends, Off The Hook, Hey Arnold, etc. It’s worth adding that the audio and
video codecs quality are Top Notch.
Another important skill students must develop
is the pronunciation and distinction of minimal pairs. To accomplish this, we
do not want our students to get bored with tedious phonology explanations, but
we can make students learn the sounds by heart with some reference words such
as “cat” for the sound “æ” in the vowel. Then, we can
create a phonological “Bingo” with minimal pairs. We may have some prices for
our lucky students.
On the following links we have extra information
that can help us to teach pronunciation and phonology in general.
Minimal Pairs Bingo
A deepest explanation of the minimal pairs
bingo.
How to Teach Pronunciation
A video created by TEFL academy on
ground-breaking ways to teach pronunciation in our classroom.
References
IntTEFLAcademy
(Dirección). (2011). How to Teach Pronunciation [Video].
Spratt, M.,
Pulverness, A., & Williams, M. (2012). The TKT Course Modules 1,2 and
3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, M. (12
de January de 2004). One Stop English. Obtenido de
http://www.onestopenglish.com/community/lesson-share/pdf-content/pronunciation/pronunciation-minimal-pairs-pronunciation-lesson-plan/147626.article
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