There's so much more to teaching pronunciation than drilling and the phonetic alphabet. A few simple exercises can open your students' senses to the rhythms and patterns of speech.
IATEFL Pronunciation Sig magazine 'Speak Out', issue 30, Sept 2003
For me, the first example that springs to mind when talking about minimal pairs is ship or sheep. This is almost certainly due to the influence of the title of the well known book Ship or Sheep by Anne Baker. The formula is this: take a word, remove one of the phonemes and replace it with another such that it forms a different word.
We will look at 8 features of pronunciation which are of particular relevance for Spanish speaking learners of English. These will include vowels, spelling of vowels, consonants, clusters, word stress, stress patterns, tonic syllables and joined up speech. Each feature will be explained, contrasted with Spanish and demonstrated with an example game.
English Teaching Professional, issue 40, September 2005
There are three distinct aspects of intonation:
1. Separating what you say into groups of words;
2. Stressing the most important word in each of these groups;
3. Ending each group of words with the voice going up or down.
In this article, we’ll look at simple, practical ways of presenting intonation from each of these three ‘takes’ in turn.
In this workshop, we will look at the pronunciation of grammar features including verb inflections, contractions, auxiliaries, part of speech and clause structure. We will see how the pronunciation of these features is particularly important for meaning, and can be easily integrated into course materials. We will look at ways of working on these areas of pronunciation.
