Pronunciation is an important but often overlooked part of language teaching. Teachers should aim for intelligible pronunciation rather than native-like accuracy. There are four key areas of pronunciation - individual sounds, word stress, intonation, and connected speech. For individual sounds, teachers can use minimal pairs, demonstration, and phonetic symbols to help students distinguish sounds. Word stress and intonation also impact meaning and teachers should draw students' attention to these features. Connected speech helps fluency so teachers can have students practice phrases and sentences. A variety of materials like songs, poems and multimedia can make pronunciation practice engaging.

2. PRONUNCIATION
• Most English teachers make students study grammar and vocabulary, practise
functional dialogues but they make little attempt to teach pronunciation in any
overt way. They may feel they have too much to do and they may claim that
without a formal pronunciation syllabus and without specific pronunciation
teaching, many students seem to acquire pronunciation in the course of their
studies. Pronunciation teaching not only makes students aware of different sounds
and sound features, but can also improve their speaking. Pronunciation allows
students to get over serious intelligibility problems. The question of what aim to
achieve may arise in connection with teaching pronunciation. Many students do
not want to sound like native speakers, they wish to be speakers of English as an
international language and it does not imply trying to sound exactly like someone
from Britain or Canada. (Harmer 2003: 184). It has become customary for English
teachers to consider intelligibility as the prime goal of pronunciation teaching. It
means that students should be able to use pronunciation which is good enough for
them to be understood. If their pronunciation is not up to this standard, there is a
serious danger that they will fail to communicate effectively. So the aim of
teaching pronunciation is to require our students to work towards an intelligible
pronunciation rather than achieve a native-speaker quality.

3. • When to teach pronunciation? Teachers have to decide when to include
pronunciation teaching into lesson sequences. There are several options
to choose from: -
• some teachers devote whole lesson sequences to pronunciation –
Sometimes students may listen to a longer tape, working on listening skills
before moving to the pronunciation part of the sequence;
• Discrete slots – some teachers separate bits of pronunciation work into
lesson sequences; over a period of weeks they work on all the individual
phonemes either separately or in contrasting pairs;
• Integrated phases – many teachers get students to focus on
pronunciation issues as an integral part of a lesson; if necessary, having
students work on sounds that are especially prominent or getting them to
imitate intonation patterns for question for example; when we model
words and phrases we draw our students’ attention to the way they are
said;
• Opportunistic teaching – teachers may stray from their original plan when
lesson realities make this inevitable and teach vocabulary or grammar
opportunistically because it has come up.

4. The areas of pronunciation
• There are four major areas of pronunciation: the area of individual
sounds, that of word stress, intonation and connected speech. If
intelligibility is the goal of teaching pronunciation, speakers are to get their
message across. For example, [q] and [p] may not cause a lack of intelligibility if
they are confused, but being very difficult sounds for Hungarian learners they are
often mixed with [T], [S] and [F], so mixing the words ‘free’ and ‘three’ can lead to
misunderstanding. Stressing words and phrases correctly is vital if emphasis is to
be given to the important parts of messages and if words are to be understood
correctly. This area of pronunciation is very difficult for Hungarian learners as the
word stress always gets in initial position in Hungarian words while English word
stress keeps changing. Different word stresses can lead to the different meanings
of the word, for example ‘record, n. [aREKeD]’ and ‘record, v. [RkaKjdD]’. Intonation
– the ability to vary the pitch and tune of speech – is also an important meaning
carrier. Connected speech will make the speech act fluent and intelligible as a
whole. In the following parts of this chapter the problems of each area will be
defined and certain recipes of how to teach pronunciation in the given area will be
provided.

5. Individual sounds
• Students of English have great difficulty hearing pronunciation features
which we want them to reproduce. Speakers of different first languages
have problems with different sounds, for example, they cannot distinguish
between two sounds or they do not have certain sounds in their mother
tongue e.g. [D] and [q]. Students are not familiar with sounds like [W], [E],
[i], [p] and [q]. There are two ways of dealing with this problem: we can
show students how sounds are made through demonstration, diagrams or
explanation. The other way of presenting its pronunciation is to draw the
sounds to their attention every time they appear on a cassette or in the
conversation. This is the way how we can train the students’ ears.
Teachers can use the minimal pair system through which students can
recognise the difference between two similar sounds. Contrasting two
sounds which are very similar and often confused is a popular way of
getting students to concentrate on specific aspects of pronunciation. This
activity can be carried out by giving examples, both taken from English or
one word taken from English and the other one taken from Hungarian.

6. • Hungarians cannot pronounce the bilabial
consonant “w”, they say dentilabial “v”
instead of English “w” [dʌblju:].
The word e.g. “success” [sək'ses] sounds in
Hungarian “szákszesz”. (The Hungarian “sz” is
a double letter sounds like [s:].)

7. • a. vowels
[k], [Id] – compare Br. ‘film’ and Hun. ‘film’.
[E], [i] – ‘bed’ and ‘bad’
[s], [j], [hd] – ‘cut’, ‘cot’, ‘cart’
[jd], [em] – ‘law’, ‘low’
• b. consonants
[p], [S] – ‘think’, ‘sink’
[q], [D] – ‘this’, ‘dis-’
[W], [V] – ‘west’, ‘vest’
[R] – Hun. ‘park’, Br. ‘park’
[n], [N] – ‘sing’, ‘sin’
[P], [T], [D] – Hun. ‘póló’ and Br. ‘polo’

8. IPA
• It is possible to work on sounds of English without using any
phonetic symbols. For many students – by problems of sound and
spelling correspondence – it may make sense to be aware of the
different phonemes, and the clearest way of promoting this
awareness is to introduce the various symbols. There are other
reasons for using phonetic symbols too. Dictionaries give the
pronunciation of words in phonetic symbols. Students are usually
only asked to recognise rather than produce the different symbols
and these symbols are introduced gradually rather than all at once.
So, according to most experts on methodology, the knowledge of
phonetic symbols is of benefit to students. Teachers are expected to
present phonetic symbols simultaneously with presenting the
meaning of the new word. So as to identify these symbols, students
are expected to listen to cassette recordings and they are expected
to practise pronunciation in choral repetition first and then
individually.

9. • How do you pronounce gh in (enough) and
(ghost)?
• Enough - like F in Fun and not pronounced like
g in got

10. Stress
• Stress is important in individual words, in phrases and in sentences.
By shifting it around in a phrase or a sentence we can change
emphasis or meaning. A common way of drawing our students’
attention to stress issues is to show where the weak vowel sounds
occur in words (rather than focusing on the stressed syllables
themselves). We can draw attention to the schwa [e] like in the
word ‘photographer [FeaTgGReFe]’. We teach word stress when we
present a new word and at the practice stage clapping, tapping are
used or students can be asked to underline the stressed syllable. In
sentence stress students are supposed to focus on logical stress.
Students are supposed to recognise where to put the stress in a
new structure. Teachers are supposed to set tasks in which students
have to change logical stress according to the types of message. The
presentation and practice stages are the same as with teaching
word stress.

11. • Desert is my favorite thing .
• Dessert is my favorite thing.

12. Intonation
• . Intonation It is important for the teachers to draw their students’
attention to the way native speakers use changes in pitch to convey
meaning, to reflect the thematic structure of what they are saying and
how to convey mood. A very good practice can be for 81 students to be
asked to utter the word ‘yes’ in many different ways. Students are
expected to draw arrows under the utterances in English so that they can
recognise the various intonation patterns. In methodology, teachers have
to be aware of the fact that usually wh-questions are used when teachers
want to ask students to speak fluently in the target language. Yes-or-no
questions are asked if teachers want to check students listening or reading
comprehension. The third major type of questions is alternative questions
the aim of which is to make students use a new word or a new
grammatical structure. Hungarian intonation is monotonous compared to
English. There are several ways to teach intonation: students are expected
to make dialogues without words or many teachers use arrows on the
board and arm movements which draw patterns in the air to demonstrate
intonation. Exaggeration can also be amusing.

13. • and fluency Good pronunciation does not just mean
saying individual words or individual sounds correctly.
The sounds of words change when they come into
contact with each other. We have to draw students’
attention to it while teaching pronunciation. Fluency is
helped by having students say phrases and sentences
as quickly as possible, starting slowly and then
speeding up. Getting students to perform dialogues
and extracts taken from a drama or a short story will
also make them aware of speaking customs and help
them to improve their fluency. (Harmer 2003: 198)
When students are reading a text they can recognise
certain words linking phrases in the text
Connected speech

14. • What materials to use to improve students’
pronunciation?

15. • Songs and rhymes, poems, tongue twisters are
very useful materials which can be planned for
the initial period of lesson as a warm-up activity
or for the middle of the lesson as an ice-breaker,
or for the end of the lesson as a cooler. In modern
teaching packages CDs and multimedia CD-ROMs
can be of benefit for learners as they usually
contain authentic material and with the help of
these students’ pronunciation can be developed
easily.

16. Supervised by: Dr. Khaleel Al
Bataineh
By : Nancy Haddad
Department of English Language
and Translation
• References:
• https://www.tesol.org/docs/default-
source/books/14038_sam.pdf.
• https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/teaching/esl/pro
nunciation.cfm.