Pronunciation Lessons at Uni
 

I'll be teaching a special 5-week course on pronunciation at a uni in Tokyo this June. Each meeting will be two hours. I've just begun to research, consider, and collect ideas for the course, and was hoping for some dos and don'ts and any good activities.

So...

What are some things I should do?
What are some things I shouldn't do?
What are some good ideas that I can use in a class of 25 uni students?

Thank you in advance for your help everyone!

Re: Pronunciation Lessons at Uni
 

A friend of mine taught a 2 week pronunciation course in Japan last summer and had a lot of success having them do a rap as a final project. You can find a recording (along with student lyrics) here: http://65.182.169.197/davidfaulhaber/tricky.html

Myself, I've had pretty good success working on sentence level intonation with my students. I'm not sure how it is for Japanese learners, but for Chinese learners of English, the fact that English is a stress-timed language (where stressed syllables are longer) is very tricky. I've been trying to help them with the rhythm, and found it to be pretty useful.

Good luck!
Dave

Re: Pronunciation Lessons at Uni
 

I'm not sure how much time you have but it might be beneficial to teach some phonics, but more so, some of the individual phonemes in English.

I assume they have already brushed over these in JHS or just through 6 years of education made some assumptions, but you could also work in images of the shape of the mouth and explain how the mouth is a musical instrument. Changes in shape create changes in sound. Most importantly, if they don't actually create the correct shapes, they can't make the correct sounds.

Re: Pronunciation Lessons at Uni
 

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???!

Re: Pronunciation Lessons at Uni
 

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

Re: Pronunciation Lessons at Uni
 

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.

Re: Pronunciation Lessons at Uni
 

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!