How to teach pronunciation - the basics

How to teach pronunciation - the basics

There are 4 main areas of pronunciation:

a) Individual sounds: we have consonants and vowels - https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/phonemic-chart - it's not necessary to be able to pronounce all of them accurately

b) Stress: Word stress - one part of words with more than one syllable is pronounced a little louder, higher and stronger, for example: 'coffee, 'escalator, pe'rimeter, ho'tel, engi'neer. Some affixes control the stress, eg. when you have a -tion ending on a word, the stress is always on the syllable before the -tion ending.

Sentence/utterance stress - we stress important words, or contrasting words to make them stand out in what we're saying. Negatives are often stressed, and key words.

c) Intonation - the music of how parts of speech rise and fall. There are some useful tendencies: usually if you are making a statement, the intonation falls. If you're asking a yes/no question, the intonation rises, but if you're asking a 'wh' question, the intonation usually falls.

d) Connected speech - how sounds and rhythm are different in normal, connected speech than in isolation

One useful way of improving pronunciation is getting learners to repeat words and phrases several times when they learn them.