[HUE]

Thank you Dave and Mark. I think a final project will be good to work towards, especially because the course only meets five times. I also think phonics will work, perhaps as a step to using the language in context.

I'm leaning towards showing how pronunciation affects comprehension, so I'll use a lot of speaking/listening activities and dialogues in the lesson. Maybe work on how to pronounce the words and sentences, then apply the material.

Any other ideas???!

[DaveESL]

Well, the connection between pronunciation and comprehension makes me think about how changes in intonation / stress can change meaning. For example, the difference between "that's YOUR pencil?" and "that's your PENCIL?"

I'm sure you can come up with some more interesting examples, though. I've done primarily content based language teaching, so I don't have a lot of materials made dealing with specific pronunciation issues. I tend to deal with them as they come up. If you're going to do some phoneme stuff, though, this website has a great list of minimal pairs (organized according to the IPA chart) that you can use. They're based on UK's received pronunciation.

Take care,
Dave

[HUE]

Dave,

Thank you for the link. It's definitely going to be a time saver for when I do some work with minimal pairs. Also thank you for the example on intonation. I'm not sure how much I'll get into word stress at the schools, because they might be low level students. But your suggestion has given me an idea for an exercise/worksheet for my site.

[HUE]

I've decided on setting up the following for the uni classes. The first half will be devoted to individual sounds, which we'll then apply with speaking activities. Being able to produce the sound, and being able to recognize the sound, are integral, I think. It also gives me the chance to use interactive activities rather than only drills.

For the second set of lessons, I'll be focusing on intonation, word and sentence stress, and inflection. We'll do a bit with this in the first half, but only as a means to get the class used to language as a whole.

Thank you to everyone who responded to the post. I'll let you know how it goes. As always, any other ideas are welcome!