Pronunciation

Teaching pronunciation is very important in helping our students communicate clearly and effectively, especially in teaching them presentation skills.

In teaching pronunciation for public speaking, I use this:

I bought this at ToysRus. It was in the educational toys section. It's a "Dental Model" by Edu-Toys.

I removed the original plastic backing and replaced it with screws and springs I bought at TIME home center.

This allows me to open it up.

This was I can also fit my hand through the back and use my fingers to illustrate the position of the tongue.

This is far more effective than using my OWN mouth as an example because it is much easier to illustrate the tongue position, and there's no 'icky' factor of looking intently into somebody else's mouth (not to mention the various dangers of halitosis, drooling, or spinach between the teeth!).

In teaching pronunciation it is vitally important that the teacher understand the physiology of the mouth and how it is used to produce sound.

In this way, it is very useful to know, understand and be completely comfortable and familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet for English.

I use the Cambridge Phonemic Chart that I studied during the CELTA course (at the very excellent Language Resources in Kobe):

This is very good for teaching students the relationships between sounds, and it's very useful to understand the layout of the chart and how it corresponds to the mouth positions. It's really very logically set out.

The vowels for example, from top to bottom are arranged according to how open the mouth is, while from left to right, they are arrange by shape of the mouth and the position of the corners of the mouth.

Several important aspects to consider include differences in how much air is used in the vocalizations of vowels in English and Japanese, and the fact that many English vowels include more than one sound, that in fact we tend to blend our vowel sounds, twist them, warble them even (particularly in relation to American Southern dialects, of which I'm guilty).

My most common use of my artificial teeth, though, is in teaching the TH sound. Beginning speakers of English sometimes encounter difficulty with fricatives such as V (often confused with B), soft TH (often confused with S) and hard TH (often confused with D). Even many advanced students still need practice in their hard TH sounds because they tend to press too hard. This is typically because they don't realize the need for air to pass between the tongue and teeth to produce the vibration that we need for a softer and more natural voiced TH.

I would encourage native speakers who are teaching pronunciation to analyze their own pronunciation and learn how THEY make sounds before teaching pronunciation to their students.

If possible, get some teeth. In the future, I'd love to find a cool rubber tongue, because me fingers just look a little weird when I'm using the teeth. I've joked with my students that I'd like to build a puppet around the teeth, but I likely will never do that. It might make it difficult to see the teeth clearly!

Date: 2009⁄11⁄19 09:21｜Permalink｜Author：nelp

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