Pronunciation - 10 Rules I Want My Students To Know

This workshop was presented by Brian Brennan, a senior teacher at International House, and attempted not only to demonstrate the importance of pronunciation in students’ language learning but also to provide teachers with some tools with which to help them.

As is the fashion at the moment the workshop was based around a numerical theme, this time 10 rules...

The following lists the 6 most practical points.

Brian’s Rules ( better perhaps, ‘language points’, as there are no actual rules).

1) What does stressing a syllable really mean?
Stressing a syllable can actually mean a number of different things but students should be made aware of the following aspects.

1) The voice rises towards the stressed syllable
2) The stressed syllable is pronounced for longer
3) The volume of the voice goes up
4) There is a change in the pitch of the voice after the syllable.

Brian suggested that work raising awareness of these points and practicing in class can significantly improve the student’s intelligibility, as imperfect word stress often leads to incomprehension in the listener even if the word elected by the student is the correct one.

2) People out there will often misunderstand unexpected pronunciation.
Following on from the last point, this statement in fact works both ways. ‘People out there’ will indeed misunderstand, but as importantly, students will misunderstand other English speakers who are pronouncing correctly.

3) The past simple regular verb -ed ending has 3 possible sounds.
Which is the one that is really different? When does it occur? Probably the least integrated language point for students. This part of the lecture focused on the /ɪd/ ending and suggested the students recognise the extra syllable and from that use the /ɪd/ sound. There was no mention of the more fundamental aspect of students’ understanding of voiced and unvoiced consonant sounds.

4) Consonant + vowel + consonant + ‘e’.
This was a useful reminder that when we add an -e to a single syllable word the vowel sound in the word lengthens. For example; hat / hate, pal / pale. A good exercise is to get students to write a number of these short words and to experiment with the changes in vowel sound.

5) Doubling the final consonant.
Similar to above, but in this case the doubling of an end consonant shortens the preceding vowel.

6) A group of words often sounds like just one chunk.
In the same way that students can learn common phrases and sentences (lexical chunking) so to for pronunciation. Words are rarely used in isolation and so it can be extremely beneficial for students to hear how groups of words sound together, which is often quite different to what students might expect if they’d only studied the written form.