Mastering Pronunciation 2: Back to basics

So you can master pronunciation, let's make sure you understand what pronunciation is.

Introduction

Before we get started, your teacher will review your homework from Lesson 1 with you.

IMPORTANT: Before you start, check in about the homework from lesson 1: 

  1. What accent is the student aiming for? Make sure that info is on their profile. If it is your accent, great! If it isn't, then gently remind them to practice with other resources (more on that later in the course) so that they can focus on that kind of English pronunciation.
  2. What is their SMART goal for pronunciation? (See Orientation 1 for more info).
  3. Did they read the blog post, Your accent may be OK? What did they take from that?

Don't spend too much time on this. They should have done at minimum (1) & (2). If they did not read the post, (3), then give them a bit of a hard time about not being a serious person or making excuses and move on.

Warm Up

Learning pronunciation is the way to speak a language. But what does that mean? What are the things you need to learn to learn pronunciation? Make a list with your teacher.

This is not meant to be exhaustive, but pronunciation is more than just vowels and consonants. Don't get into the weeds. The idea is to see if your student realises there is more to pronunciation that just being able to say "th" or "r".

 

There are 8 aspects we will go into in the language section. For now, let's see what they come up with. For your information, these 8 aspects are below. Don't share them yet. You will spoil the language section!

Phonemes—Sound units.
Vowels & consontants—Everyone should know these.
Consontant clusters—consonant sounds that come together.
Stops—In English, there are 10 stop sounds. These can be voiced or unvoiced, and are often most obvious at the ends of words.
Accents—This is a way a group or individual speaks a language.
Rhythm—In particular, the number of syllables in a word.
Intonation—this is for showing attitudes and emotions as well as other linguistic information.
Stress—Within words and sentences to convey meaning as much as just to sound correct.

Language

Let's find out which points of pronunciation are challenging for you. Your teacher will lead you in a discussion around these things:

  1. Phonemes

  2. Vowels & consontants

  3. Consontant clusters

  4. Stops

  5. Accents

  6. Rhythm

  7. Intonation

  8. Stress

This part of the lesson is to ensure that your student is aware of and paying due attention to all aspects of pronunciation.

Make sure they feel like they can do all of these with care and practice to a satisfactory level. We employ the the formal & customary rubric that near enough is good enough. Perfect mimicry of native pronunciation is not necessarily the desired outcome here. Make sure you know your student's objective.

Work through this list—discuss where necessary. This is going to be the foundation for the rest of the course.

  1. Phonemes—These are the basic building blocks of sounds in English. Ask your student how many sounds there are in English. This can be instructive. Often students are surprised to know there are 44 (since they might assume 26ish because of the alphabet). Japanese has 20 or so depending on how you count.* Danish has 52. Here's a list of phonemes in English.
  2. Vowels & consontants—The key point to mention here is that most of the variety in English accents comes from vowel sounds, but there can be some variety in consonants: hard /r/ in some varieties of English as in "car" for US/British English speakers, /ɾ/ instead of /t/ as in "water" in US/British English, /t/ instead of /θ/ as in "thirty" for Irish English speakers etc.)
  3. Consontant clusters—consonant sounds that come together that can be challenging for some speakers, like /tr/ or /st/.
  4. Stops—In English, there are 10 stop sounds - 7 oral stops and 3 nasal stops. These are: /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/, /ʔ/, /m/, /n/ and /ŋ/. These can be voiced or unvoiced, and are often most obvious at the ends of words.
  5. Accents—This is a way of speaking a language that marks you out as a member of a group (national, ethnic, class etc). Note that the word "dialect" includes things like grammatical and vocabulary differences
  6. Rhythm—In particular, the number of syllables in a word. This is where a lot of confusion happens. More on this later in the course. But a Japanese speaker might say /ne-ki-su-to/ for "next"—4 syllables for a 1 syllable word. See lesson 6.
  7. Intonation—this is for showing attitudes and emotions as well as other linguistic information. More in lesson 5.
  8. Stress—Within words and sentences to convey meaning as much as just to sound correct. This is covered more in lessons 5 & 6.

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* I have often had Japanese students challenge me on this. It's because Japanese has a syllabic writing system and there are 46 kana (the Japanese 'alphabet'). A phoneme is when you split the syllables in Japanese into their individual sounds. So in Japanese か (ka) is 2 phonemes, the /k/ sound and the /a/ sound.