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As school teachers faced with EAL learners in our classrooms, we often push the teaching of phonics down the list, especially at secondary school level. Yet communication is dependent on comprehensive pronunciation when speaking, and on decoding graphemes when reading. Consider for a moment the impact mispronunciation can have on accurate communication. For example, if I ask for soap in a restaurant, I might be faced with a blank stare! This error is caused by confusing two very similar phonemes in soap/soup.
Sometimes, dialect causes confusion too. Compare, for instance, the British and New Zealand pronunciation of vowel sounds. Speakers in New Zealand backslide their vowels, meaning that /a/ sounds like /e/ (pan or pen?) and /e/ sounds like /i/ (pen or pin?). Raising awareness of this can support learners in their understanding.
As a stress-timed language, the suprasegmental elements of speech such as stress or intonation can also become miscommunication problems when not taught. It is therefore important to teach the stress of a word along with the pronunciation of the phoneme. Consider the difficulties in understanding a sentence where the stress is placed on the wrong syllable: "I left the bottle in the hotel."
Failure to teach pronunciation often leads to fossilised errors, which become difficult to correct. The question for me is therefore: how do we include the deliberate teaching of pronunciation within a multi-skilled language-based classroom environment?
There are a couple of options. We can remediate and focus on teaching the phoneme when a communication problem arises in the classroom caused by mispronunciation. Alternatively, we can weave pronunciation teaching into our programme through deliberate planning, ensuring that we give purpose to the activities.
The resource accompanying this article shows how we can incorporate the teaching of pronunciation into our language programme in a format that can be both fun and constructive. It focuses on eliciting language and honing in on key elements of pronunciation. It raises learners awareness of the subtle differences in phonemes and provides an opportunity to improve pronunciation within the wider context of the lesson.
As a Head of Early Years in an international school following the EYFS and IPC curriculums it has always been important to ensure that the teaching of the English language is done in the classroom without the help of specialist EAL support. Early years teachers are great physical, visual talkers!
One of the key principles of teaching in the Early Years is that bilingualism has an advantage and that as the first language it has a continuing and significant role in identity, learning and the acquisition of additional languages.
Many of us have been in a situation where we want to communicate with someone who does not speak the same language. We resort to wild gestures, attempts to say unfamiliar words, grammar seems insignificant and feelings of frustration soar. Some basic vocabulary becomes our lifeline.
I have been teaching English for over 20 years and in that time I have held various teaching titles; I had a different acronym depending on which country or school I was teaching in. Over the past 20 years, I have been an ESL, an EFL, an ESP, an ESOL and an EAL teacher. As you can see ELT - English Language Teaching - comes with a whole host of acronyms. I will identify and describe them below.
*All terms below refer to students whose mother tongue is not English and who are learning English.