Practioner/action research first person narrative about my experieinces teaching pronunciation in an ESL university class.

3. Cup?
Cub!
plateau

6. Classes 1-2: Myths and misconceptions
The majority of my 12 advanced
level university students:
• Wanted to speak like a native
speaker
• Thought sounds like “th” are the
main problem.
• Thought that their pronunciation
could be improve through
“learning English like a child”.
What you believe about English may
not be exactly always so…

7. Classes 3-6: Starting with consonants, starting
where they are at
• Enthusiasm and mastery of word
endings
• Use of keywords worked well for
my class.

8. Classes 7-10: Teaching vowel sounds and
untangling a complex system
My students said….
• “I had confusion about the
vowels’pronunciation…kno
wing these rules made my
life easier.”
• “I was purely memorizing
all those pronunciation of
English words. I should
have memorized rules
instead of the
pronunciation. “

9. Classes 8-12: Word stress – awareness raising
Students were asked to write a needs analysis at the beginning of the
semester. They were asked to identify problems that contributed to
unintelligibility.
Guess: How many of the
12 students identified
word stress as any kind of
pronunciation goal?

10. Classes 13-23: Focusing suprasegmentals and
core issues of intelligibility
In the final self-reflection…
• One student cited the usefulness
of intonation to make her Pinyin
name spelling understood.
• Another cited that it was useful
for clearing up
misunderstandings [contrastive
stress].

11. Classes 23-28: Wrapping up with final
presentations and applying what we know
• 102 instances of feedback were collected.
• 0 instances were “damaging” (inaccurate or clearly ill-intended)
(Rollinson, 2005).
• Students were able to give specific feedback/strategies:
• “Work on word stress on your keywords”.
• “Check the pronunciation of ‘China’ [not ‘Chinar’]”.
• “Slow down. Focus on pausing.”