Sabah,

I have always advocated a course, module, chapter (or as much time as is feasible) in phonetics before trying to pronounce any foreign language. When starting only with the inventory of sounds from a native language, students do not appreciate all the possibilities for human speech. If they start with the full inventory, it seems easier to pick and choose what sounds are needed for the target language with less influence from the native language.

Of course, English presents a further problem in that the writing system is only semi-phonetic. Each symbol can produce multiple sounds, and each sound can be produced by a variety of symbols, sometimes even non-adjacent. So suggestions such as by Hossein, Bakhtiar, and Napolean for extensive oral practice is on the mark.

Dear Sabah,

You could start off at the word level, moving on to the phrase level and finally to the sentence level. Drills are vital in ensuring they grasp each pronunciation. Video clips may help enhance their ability. Attached are some links for your reference.

Best Wishes!

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1081993.pdf

http://www.cal.org/caelanetwork/pdfs/TeachingPronunciationWeb.pdf

http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_4_No_5_1_March_2014/3.pdf

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/poznan03_wells.pdf

Thanks Milani for nice suggestions and links.

How to teach pronunciation to EFL students? How to teach pronunciation to EFL students? 

Not sure following Text To Speech websites will help i.e. type the paragraph / text in & click the button converting into speech.  The EFL students can play as many times as needed until they are improved.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Does_anyone_have_experience_with_text_to_speech_Are_there_some_programs_about_this#view=57974a6d404854edb84d27c8

From my personal experience in learning EFL, numerous effortless pronunciation is important as practice makes perfect.  Also you can take a look on the following link hope can help.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=ways+to+improve+english+pronunciation

To begin with, there is no perfect pronunciation.  There is a wide difference in how native speakers pronounce words.  So there is not really "correct" or "incorrect."  

Hossein has good suggestions. 

But consider thinking of language pronunciation as music -- there is a certain rhythm, pitch and timbre. When students listen to examples, they should try to reproduce these elements as closely as possible.

Just let them watch some cartoons in English! 

 Sabah,

I have always advocated a course, module, chapter (or as much time as is feasible) in phonetics before trying to pronounce any foreign language. When starting only with the inventory of sounds from a native language, students do not appreciate all the possibilities for human speech. If they start with the full inventory, it seems easier to pick and choose what sounds are needed for the target language with less influence from the native language.

Of course, English presents a further problem in that the writing system is only semi-phonetic. Each symbol can produce multiple sounds, and each sound can be produced by a variety of symbols, sometimes even non-adjacent. So suggestions such as by Hossein, Bakhtiar, and Napolean for extensive oral practice is on the mark.

EFL teachers face two big challenges in teaching pronunciation. The first is to help students to wrap their heads, and their mouths, around the wide phonemic range of English (which includes two standard forms, British and American, as well as many dialectal variations). The second is to help students to negotiate the difficulties of "translating" written words into their spoken counterparts. Too often, the way an English word is spelled offers no clues (or, worse, misdirects us) as to how it should be pronounced. In my own early experience of learning English, one thing I found invaluably helpful was to learn a little about the history of the language. Everything began to make sense once I learned that English was so "strange" because the way the words are spelled encode information about their origin (Anglo-Saxon, French, Latinate, etc.) and, sometimes, the history of their transmission and transformation. Once I knew this, what had been incomprehensibly daunting proved to be fun and interesting, like going on an Easter egg hunt. The task was demystified, and I was once more in control. I don't think students need to know a lot about this, but it would be reassuring to know that there exists a strong connection between the language they are studying now and the language as it developed over time, in other words, that there is a reason for the things they don't yet understand. So much of learning is psychological empowerment.

Here's an online phonetics and pronunciation course for L1 speakers of Chinese - it's one of the most popular online courses at Taiwan University:

http://ocw.aca.ntu.edu.tw/ntu-ocw/index.php/ocw/cou/101S102

There are many methods to teach pronunciation and the above suggestions are all workable. I suggest one that is an informal one; ask your students to do extensive listening and through the input hypothesis of Krashen this is going to work wonders.

However teachers must avoid the mixing of  two different skills.Please for the sake of the reading development of your students do not mix reading and pronunciation. These are two different and separate skills and must be taught separately. Please refer to Christine Nuttall on the topic of Reading.

One thing often neglected is to teach EFL students to appreciate their own accent. To teach them that the point is to be articulate and to communicate, and not to have a particular accent associated with the "standard". I suspect this is something that many teachers of EFL need to reflect deeply also.

Very rarely achieved and perhaps not worth the effort, however the desirable is to come closer to the standard so that one may  not be misunderstood, for example, I heard 'pig issue' for big issue' which is un acceptable and issues like that

I agree with the previous answer with a wide range of limitations, I don't want the learner to underestimate the importance of the spelling of the vocabulary items. I know it's very difficult to remember each word especially when it's not used frequently. So teaching word families makes the process easier. I have tried teaching word families i.e. introducing group of words that belong to the same root with different affixes; suffixes or prefixes, or giving different words with similar affixes; suffixes or prefixes. This way explains a wide range of spelling rules which should be given in teaching books, especially the higher grades ones.

It’s a good way to make the pupil fill in charts of words with similar suffixes or prefixes, taking into consideration the spelling rules. so the teacher must be aware of the spelling rules in order to master the derivational and the inflectional system of each item of vocabulary.

I missed the point of the pronunciation which comes after solving the problem of spelling. Here I agree that it's not a big deal when the pupil confuses between some similar words, what important here is convey the message that he wants the listener to receive.This process can be accomplished gradually by time in steps not at once.

I grew up speaking Spanish and learning to pronounce English was somewhat difficult for me. I'll give you a hint of what helped me improve my pronunciation, but keep in mind this was my personal experience. 

-First: Praise them when they read to encourage them to read more, if they feel like you don't understand a word they say, it will be harder for them to feel the desire to read in front of you.

-Second: tell them to repeat a certain word they mispronounced and then imitate how they say it and how they should say it. for example, there is no distinction between j/y in Spanish so I used to say pass me the "yello" instead of pass me the "jello" or say "yam" instead of "jam". Then my friends told me to say "jello" like in Benjamin for "yellow" was a color, since then I was able to realize that there is a  difference between the two sounds and pronounce it correctly.

-Third: tell them is ok to use their accent for the meantime until they develop an american accent, there are many accents in america, that boost one's confidence and eventually confidence inspires practice and practice give birth to perfection.

- Fourth: The muscles you utilize when you speak are different. In Spanish we tight the muscles and use our throat and the constant hitting of the tongue against the ceiling of your mouth to create sound. One thing that helped me was to relax my mouth and try to speak slower

-Fifth: Try reading the portion first and then have them read it, that way is easier to distinguish the sounds. It was ok with me to record the same paragraph several times to listen to my mistakes and correct them.

-Finally: Don't give up, your efforts will never go to waste. 

 I hope this serves you even though is a very personal experience.

Good Luck

Dear Sabah, 

Hi there, 

Undoubtedly, decent comments have been presented in pursuit of your question here, but I felt that I wanted to add something to the awesome answers added above. 

Teaching your students English pronunciation does not necessarily mean teaching them how to speak like a native speaker, and it is fine to have a different accent. Getting your students to a level where they can speak clearly and articulately with, to a somewhat good level of pronunciation, means you're doing a great job at helping your students. 

Firstly, you might want to check their pronunciation level because, without the knowledge of their current pronunciation competence, I am afraid you might not be able to take any action to help them maximize their pronunciation competence. 

Secondly and most importantly, the best way to improve students' pronunciation is to teach them each different sound of English at the first place. And in order to learn each different sound of English, it is very helpful to learn each different symbol that represents the sounds of English. In writing English, 26 letters of the alphabet are used, but there are over 40 sounds in English. That is, it is not easy to show these sounds using only letters. So, there is a system of sounds which we have in English which is quite necessary to get your students learn them. Hence, if you want your students to improve their English pronunciation, you might want to teach them the English sounds and symbols well. 

Thirdly, it is seminal to get your students to practise pronunciation where there are sentences that are commonly said, but they are said wrongly and unnaturally. For that, you may say a sentence or phrase or pairs and then put them on the whiteboard and ask your students which one you said. You can get them practise with a few sentences and they you may also ask them to create their own sentences and get the students practise them until they are said correctly.  

Fourthly, it is crucially important to have your students listen to sentences from tapes or CDs and repeat key words, paying close attention to their stress. 

Last but not least, you can try to encourage your students to get as much listening experience outside of the classroom as possible. Listening doesn’t need to be boring; tell your students to listen to music, TV shows, movies, anything in English will work by all means. Hope this helps. 

Regards, 

Karwan

Hi Sabah,

I think one more element that you should take into consideration is to identify the differences in the source language and the target language. You need to be aware of the similarities and differences of both languages, perhaps by conducting a simple contrastive analysis. Once this is determined, you may want to look at what types of strategies are generally used to cater to the needs of the pronunciation difficulties faced by your students. The strategies that they use may provide an answer to why they mispronounce and how this problem could be further corrected. All the best!

I think one thing teachers forget to teach is phonemic awareness. Students have to be taught the processes that occur when English is spoken naturally by NS and sounds become elided, assimilated, or linked, as in whaddaya doin? or whenzshi gonna go? If EFL/ESL students don't know that these processes happen in real-life NS speech, they will never be able to perceive what is said to them correctly. I'm not sure if it's 100% necessary to teach them how to use connected speech, but they certainly have to understand the process in order to perceive or predict what is being communicated and to join the conversation!

I am not sure I can give good advice, but I hope sharing these personnal observations can help.

First, I think it really depends on the age group because obviously you cannot offert the same activities to children and young adults. HOwever, I think it desirable to emphasize FUN, whatever the age-group.

The first obstacle to pronouncing correctly is not listening well enough to hear the right sound.

People think they reproduce the sound just pronounced, either by their teacher, or a recorded model, and they keep reproducing the same mistake over and over, without being aware of it.

So of course, a phonetics class should take care of that, but when you teach to non-specialist, there is usually no time for it, and they would not be very interested. Their aim is communicating in an international surrounding.

I have also noticed that a lot of students are able to sing perfectly well in English, but they reverse to their bad habits and very poor French pronounciation when they speak.

I try to use their singing to show them they are actually able to pronounce the right sound, which some of them deny saying it is impossible!

I also have a very short recording (30s, about 60 words) from TV news about the discovery of Jupiter's rings.

I show it several times, the I also show the script, with no punctuation.

I ask the students to read as I play the video without the sound. Of course, they are slower and finish well after the last image, but it does not matter. The point is to get them to get the right breathing pause and work on sentence pronunciation patterns and linking, and, if necessary individual words.

The French want to separate every word and insist on the last syllable, which is just the opposite of English where words are linked, and generally the stress is at the begining of a word.

With adults, I find comparing a useful tool to raise awareness and help overcome the feeling of being ridiculous (or even betraying one's identity) which so often hinders pronounciation efforts.

Depending on the mother tongue of learners, each has to adapt and focus on the sounds which are notoriously difficult.

Ditto on Sophie's response, especially the part about singing as a way of teaching more natural-sounding pronunciation. My own experience has been that singing popular songs is enormously helpful in many ways: learning the correct pronunciation of individual words and natural phrasing for strings of words, acquiring new (and often quite useful) vocabulary, reinforcing knowledge of basic grammar, and-- perhaps most important of all-- building confidence and having fun. One more thing. As we learn to enunciate the lyrics of a new song along with the music, the permanent link formed between the words and the melody in our brains makes both much, much easier to recall. To test what it feels like for my students, I've tried doing this myself with foreign languages, and have found that, even after a lapse of many months, I can recall the lyrics almost perfectly as soon as I hear the melody. This is a wonderful feeling, and proof that anyone can learn a new language, and learn it well, regardless of age. BTW, YouTube is a great resource for this.

From my own experience, I think students need to know what the language sounds like when spoken by native speakers. Part of the accent is the intonation and emphasis. By watching movies with subtitles, especially ones that are genuinely well done, students can get a sense of the language tone, pace, rhythm and articulation. The pointers to phonetics and phonemics are crucial as well. So combine that more theoretical training with the applied listening for competence. You can also drill them on phonemic differences. I was just in Iceland. Most service people speak English. But I repeatedly had to ask whether someone was saying 50 or 15. They tended to drop the emphasis that we use on fifTEEN. So identifying and practicing these easily confused articulations is helpful. Another thing is drill and repetition. Sorry, but you have to train your mouth. I was also just in Sweden with people from other parts of Scandinavia. They all use what is fundamentally the same vocabulary articulated very differently (except for the Finns). I had to practice over and over just to say the name of the town we were in, not because I had the sounds wrong, but because the use of the mouth is so very different in Swedish. Those muscles have to be trained. As well, there are videos of linguists (can't find right now) showing for instance, nasality, pitch, etc. that also accompany different languages, aside from phonology. But the starting point for all that is hearing something interesting in the language and starting to imitate it, adding the support of the technical aspects.

Eleanor: Excellent post!

Eleanor,

Good thoughts!

15 is one of those wacky words in English that changes its stress pattern according to where it falls in a sentences. "I have told you FIFteen times that I am not yet fifTEEN." "The TENNessee Titans are from TenneSSEE." The items have built-in trickiness.

In addition to their textbook, please try real words from their real life tasks and activities. You may like to see the real functions in my postings on TESOL Benchmarks. I sorted out 80 plus real words to include in pronunciation. I hope it helps!

I like Eleanor's thought provoking response. With this kind of humorous approach learning is faster. Thanks

I think it's important to provide accurate and frequent models of the TL and incorporate work on phonology into every lesson, for example, drilling, working on individual phonemes (introduce the phonemic chart) and encourage learners to focus on the sound of words and not their orthography.

I found this book very useful:

Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D. M., & Goodwin, J. M. (2010). Teaching pronunciation hardback with audio CDs (2): A course book and reference guide. Cambridge University Press.

hi. listening to authentic materials can help learners to improve their pronunciation. although there are some problematic areas for EFl learners related to L1 influence, other areas can be enhanced by listening and speaking. English MUSIC, FILMS, NEWS ARE ALSO ADVISABLE. BEST