I believe that speaking English or any other language is a physical skill just like typing on your keyboard with both hands while looking at the screen. Imagine that your fingers have repeatedly performed the same movements to the extent of memorizing the exact location of every button on the keyboard. You can even imagine how YOUR brain is sitting back having a siesta proudly reaping the rewards of a little bit of programming that it had created and initiated. The brain kept signalling to your fingers to press the same buttons over and over until your fingers memorized the movements and no longer required guidance from your brain. Speaking English is no different. It is most certainly much more complex but the concept remains the same.
On a typical day at an ESL school, most English teachers teach pronunciation for 5, 10, 20 or 30 minutes max! They just don’t know how teach it for much longer. They only cover that little pronunciation box (often a 5-min activity) in the textbook and fail to go beyond that. There are essentially 2 reasons that teachers avoid teaching pronunciation or even dislike it:
1-Pronunciation is misunderstood thus underrated.
2-Pronunciation is difficult thus feared.
Why is pronunciation misunderstood?
Well because it has always been solely related to accent reduction work and/or to improving the learners’ intelligibility only after being deemed proficient in other areas such as grammar, vocabulary, reading comprehension, academic writing etc. Although pronunciation does indeed improve the learners’ speech clarity and reduce/eliminate the impact of their mother tongue on English, there is so much more to it. When used as a method (as opposed to a separate skill), pronunciation can be used to contextualize grammar and enable the students to retain and then retrieve a larger number of vocabulary items. We tend to remember the words we know the sounds of. By freeing the students of the constraints of their mother tongue and reprogramming their brains to process the natural sounds of English, they’ll be cognitively more capable of grasping its syntax and vocabulary. Let me reiterate that speaking English like a native is not and SHOULD not be an aim to attain but rather a training or teaching method that will help the students reach their utmost potential in language learning.
Conclusion: Use pronunciation as a tool to teach grammar and vocabulary rather than using it as a time-filler/killer activity to practice individual sounds without a real aim or purpose.
Why is pronunciation difficult?
Because unlike other areas of language such as grammar and vocabulary, it does not only require knowledge and a good understanding of the rules, but also the ears of a musician, the performance talent of an actor, the charisma of a leader, the passion of an artist and the skills of a coach. You must be wondering why a pronunciation teacher would need to possess such divine traits and the truth is that causing a drastic transformation in the speaking and listening skills of the students within a limited amount of time is by far the most challenging and demanding task for both teachers and students in the classroom. That is where the most experienced of English teachers fail only to blame their failure on the students’ age, motivation and other factors, which can many times be true but certainly not as often as the teachers claim them to be.
Conclusion: It is difficult but definitely worth it.
So what is pronunciation?
Pronunciation is the final layer of a very complex 5-layered process beginning with culture as the first layer which plays a fundamental role in molding character or personality, which in turn defines what I call the “BAMME ” (Behavior, Attitude, Mood, Manners and Emotions). The “BAMME” dictates our ideas and thoughts which we express using voice by releasing sounds that eventually characterize who we are and form our social profile…our identity. Look at the picture below.
Now the sounds we release are defined roughly by 3 major players: Phonemes, rhythm and pitch. Each one of these 3 major players, however, contains “keys” to producing clear native-like English speech. In this blog, there are 7 keys to native-like English which you will learn to recognize in any spoken English text.
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