Some Techniques for Teaching Pronunciation
David F. Dalton

Background
When I did my initial training as an E.F.L. teacher, one of the course tutors always described pronunciation as "the Cinderella of language teaching", i.e. she never got to go to the ball. By this he was referring to the often low level of emphasis placed on this very important language skill. We are comfortable teaching reading, writing , listening and to a degree, general oral skills, but when it comes to pronunciation we often lack the basic knowledge of articulatory phonetics (not difficult to aquire) to offer our students anything more than rudimentary (and often unhelpful) advice such as, "it sounds like this ; uuuh".
There is also a tendency for us to focus on production as the main problem affecting our learners. Most research however, shows clearly that the problem is more likely to be reception - what you don`t hear, you can`t say. Moreover, if the "English" sound is not clearly received, the brain of the learner converts it into the closest sound in their own language . Thus the dental English fricative / th / (sorry, phonetic symbols can`t easily be displayed) in "those" ,becomes converted by Spanish speakers into the denatlised Spanish /d/ , producing "dose" as this is what the speaker hears. Given this reality , it would seem logical to place a heavy emphasis on listening (reception) as a way into releasing appropriate pronunciation (production).
Apart from using knowledge of our students and our ears in order to be aware of their pronunciation problems, it is also useful to have some prior knowledge of what elements of English phonetics and phonology are likely to cause problems. This is one area of language learning where few people would question the use of contrastive analysis. For instance, to give some simple examples, we can predict that Arabic speakers will have difficulty distinguishing between / p / and / b / , Japanese speakers will not perceive the difference between / l / and / r / and Spanish speakers will hava a problem realising consonant clusters like [ sts ]. Having informed him or herself of some of the main areas of contrast between native language and target language and what difficulties students have, it then remains for the teacher to build this information into some meaningful classroom exercises.
Techniques :
Exercise should be simple, accessible , fun and combine reception and production. Some students (usually adults) do feel embarassed to pull ridiculuous faces when practising vowel sounds (this may be personal or cultural or both) but I have generally found that this soon passes and students enjoy the pronunciation work. Where possible, exercises should be communicative in that they should (and do generate differences of opinion and disagreement about what was said/heard. Below are two examples.
Exercise A :
After having taught or exposed the students to long and short vowels through listening and oral work, the teacher can check recognition, retention and ability to discriminate in the following way. This could also be used simply for teaching.
Stage 1 :
The teacher writes a variety of words containing the target sounds (long and short vowels) on the board. The following is just one possible set.
PORT PIT PAT PERT PET POT PUTT PUT PART PEAT
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Here, the only difference in sound is that of the vowel - familiar to anyone who has done minimal pair work. As in these examples, the word should begin and end with the same consonant. 0, 3, 8, and 9, are long vowels and the rest are short.
Stage 2 :
The teacher then models each word and individal repetition follows. The vowel sound can be isolated and the procedure repeated until the teacher is reasonably sure that there are no major problems. He or she then tells the students that they are going to hear one of the words and must write the number which corresponds to the word they hear. What the students have written is then checked and compared.
This automatically leads into a discussion of what they heard and what sounds they are confusing. If student X heard1 when the teacher said 9, they are confusing the short vowel / I / with the long vowel / i: / . The teacher gives feedback and the sounds may then be modelled again and practised.
Stage 3:
Two or three words are then presented together and the procedure repeated. The teacher then tells the class they are going to hear six words and that the numbers correspond to an important telephone number. The teacher delivers the words and asks , "What`s my number?". Again there will be differences in what was heard. This allows a focus on which sounds are not being discriminated effectively by which students and where their problems lie. Later discussion may revolve aroud what strategies students may employ to improve their discrimination skills - songs, minimal pair games with friends, movies, radio, etc.
Stage 4:
Learners are then invited to model the telephone number. This stage usually generates much discussion and disagreement along the lines of - "You said ...... ", "