Approaches to Teaching Pronunciation

When it comes to teaching English to foreigners, one of the burning issues is what variety of English should predominate in classes.  Many educational institutions use student books that rely heavily on Received Pronunciation (RP) and revolve around British culture.  However, students may want to learn English of the American variety.  School curriculums usually don’t allow teachers to divide class time equally between British and American English, so teachers are compelled to choose just one of these two distinctive varieties to focus on.

The best approach to teaching pronunciation in the ESL classroom will depend on the first language of the learners (unless it’s a multinational group) and individual learning styles.

SEE ALSO: Creating the Right Atmosphere for Practicing Spoken English

1.  The first language of the learners

A student’s first language (L1) largely determines the strengths and weaknesses that the individual will have in learning to pronounce English.  Our first language contains the sounds we know how to make and recognize.  We have been exposed to these sounds since birth, and they have become part of our psychological reality.

When we hear a foreign sound, our brains automatically assign it to one of the sounds from L1.  For example, when Russians hear the vowel /æ/ in cat (which is not a phoneme in Russian) it gets assigned to the next closest Russian vowel, which is /ɛ/.  The word cat is then pronounced [kɛt], but this is unlikely to interfere with communication and probably shouldn’t take up too much class time.

The challenges faced by Russians and other Indo-European speakers are nothing compared with the difficulties that Thai speakers have.  The following sounds don’t occur in word-final position in Thai: /θ/ /ð/ /s/ /z/ /ʃ/ /ʒ/ /tʃ/ /dʒ/.  Like Russians, they too assign the sounds to a phoneme from L1, and in this case they’re all replaced with /t/.  Since this has the potential to seriously interfere with communication, a teacher should make it a priority to spend extra time practicing these sounds with the students.  Special activities, exercises and games should be used to focus on these sounds.

2.  Individual learning styles

Depending on a number of factors, such as personality and educational background, students have different learning styles and preferences.

If you open a French textbook published in 1950 and compare it with a modern one, you will notice that the older book has more phonetic script and technical terminology (which you might not know).  The modern book probably won’t have any phonetic script, and the technical terms will be kept to a minimum.

The modern approach relies more on a student’s intuition to learn the sounds and grammar, while in the old days the approach was more “scientific”.  These changes reflect the fact that most people learn best using their intuition.

Also, people learn better when they’re enjoying themselves, and those old-fashioned textbooks tend to be boring.  Learning phonetic script and studying the sounds never hurts, though, and it really doesn’t take that much extra effort on the part of the student.  One of the benefits of phonetic script is that it forces students to focus on individual sounds.  English has only 6 vowel letters to represent roughly 20 vowel sounds! Awareness of these sounds is essential to good pronunciation.

American or British Pronunciation?

Students often want to know whether they should learn American or British pronunciation, and this debate is as old as ESL itself.  When it comes to difficulty, the difference between the two isn’t significant and shouldn’t influence a student’s decision.

When choosing between the two systems, students should consider where they’ll be using English and with whom.

If they live in Latin America, for instance, it’s likely that they will encounter American English more often than British.  On the other hand, someone living in the EU will probably encounter just as many British people as Americans.  The fact is that both are important.  Students should therefore choose to speak one or the other, but should learn to understand both.  Some people might prefer British English for historical reasons, but even so, the influence of American English can’t be denied; American films and TV shows are popular all over the world.  Even if you watch BBC news, there will be reports on what’s going on in the United States.

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