6 Activities to Improve Pronunciation

Simple, Effective Tasks to Help Your Students

Pronunciation can often be complex, especially the phonetic script, but you don’t have to be an expert to teach pronunciation well.

1. Find out what your students can’t do

Your students will have different problems with pronunciation depending on their first language. Chinese learners often have problems with vowel sounds and r in words like very. Arabic speakers can often get p and b mixed up, Spanish and Farsi speakers sometimes add an extra e in front of words that begin with an s like speak and Spain so they become espeak and espain. To find out what problems your students have, you can listen to them talking to each other or get them to read a text aloud for the class – note down the problems they have with their pronunciation. You can also check on Google to find out common problems for specific languages.

2.  Introduce minimal pairs

Minimal pairs are words that sound almost the same but have a subtle pronunciation difference. Studying them will help them become aware of different vowel sounds and how to pronounce them. Here are some examples of minimal pairs but you can search Google for an exhaustive list!

sheep/ship

low/ throw

food / good

tin/ten

bet/bat

bat/bad

cat/cut

Activities with minimal pairs

• Drilling – get students to pronounce the words chorally in class copying your pronunciation or one from a listening text.
• Write minimal pairs on the back of playing cards and ask students to play pelmanism with the pairs that match.
• Check out this great minimal pairs bingo game here
• Have a look at the legendary pronunciation text book Ship or Sheep

3. Remember English is a stress-timed language

Unlike some languages, English places the stress on important words in a sentence and not on others, this is why native speakers can sometimes leave out little words in informal speech, this is called ellipsis e.g. Where you been?

It’s important for students to get the stress right if they are going to sound natural. For example: Where do you live? The stress is on Where and live, do isn’t stressed at all. Here are some examples you could share with your students. Ask them to underline stressed words.

Where do you come from?

I come from New York in the USA.

What languages do you speak?

Suggested activities

• Dictate sentences and ask students to mark the words that are stressed.
• Underline the stressed words in a dialogue.
• Say the sentences aloud and then drill the sentences in class chorally.
• Students record the sentences on their smartphones and check their stress.

4. Focus on stress patterns in words

Like sentences, words often have different stress patterns. The easiest way to identify these is by underlining the stressed part of the word. Encourage your students to break words down into syllables, for example beau-ti-ful, ask them to identify where the stressed part of the word is by reading it in different ways: beautiful / beautiful / beautiful. Ask students Which one is correct?– the correct answer is beautiful. When students record new words make sure they also record where the stress sits in the word by underlining the right syllable.

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