A manual for

excellence

Authors:

María José Marín Padilla

Anthony Meléndez Mora

www.magazine.com

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1

To the reader:

Teachers are in a constant learning of new teaching

methods or new ways to teach. Pronunciation teachers

are not an exception to this. That`s why this manual

can help any pronunciation teacher to grow by

learning about different activities they can apply in

their classes, tips to teach pronunciation, and more. In

pronunciation, you have to be very creative and know

how to teach it; in this manual you can find information

to achieve those goals.

INDEX

Pronunciation Activities 3

Some pronunciation activities guides for teachers to follow and use in their classes

Articles 11 Our writers wrote a page of methods of teaching pronunciation that they think might be useful in our reader’s classes

Tips to teach pronunciation 13 Recommendations for pronunciations classes to be more effective

Procedure:

The teacher will have several words for the students, if they answer correctly

they get the point and can draw either “X” or “O” in the Tic Tac Toe game. If

they don’t answer correctly the other groups gets the first group point. Either if

the group in turn answer or miss the word after their turn is the other’s turn to

play.

Tic Tac Toe chart:

Recommended minimal pairs:

Bin/ Bean

Chip/ Cheap

Fit/ Feet

His/ He’s

It/ Eat

Sit/ Seat

Fill/ Feel Hill/ He’ll

When comes to vocabulary we all know a lot of words but how good do we know

about their sounds?

In the following square write down how many words do you know with the sound

we’ve been studying (/a/ and /ɔ/).

1) Were they more than 10? Yes No

2) Will you be willing to rise that number to 60? Yes

No

3) If your answer was yes during one week you should start remember some other

words and learning new one

This part is after the week of new learning

4) Did you remembered or learned other words? Yes

No

5) Write the words you already know and the new ones

6) Did you think reviewing and learning new vocabulary was useful? Yes

No

/I/

Exercise 2: read the dialogue to the students. The students have to listen to a dialogue and fill in the blanks. After they finish, check the answers by telling to 3 volunteers to represent someone of the dialogue and read their part aloud.

Worksheet

1. Vocabulary

Listen and repeat these words with the sound /I/. In words with more than one

syllable, the stressed syllable is in bold.

2. Dialogue: An interesting film

Two friends have plans to see a film.

Listen to the dialogue and fill in the blanks with words from exercise

Cindy (ringing her friend’s doorbell)

Mrs. Kim Hello, Cindy.

Cindy Hi, Mrs. Kim. ___Is_____ William in? Is he coming with me to the film?

I picked up a ________________ for him.

Mrs. Kim Oh, William’s sick.

Cindy Here he is! Hi, William! Are you _____________?

William What film is it? Anything ______________?

Cindy ________ King Kong. And it ________________ in fifteen minutes.

William Fifty minutes? Come in and ________ down.

Cindy Not fifty minutes, fifteen!

Mrs. Kim Listen, William, _________you’re sick, I don’t think…

Instructions for teachers. Exercise 1: give students the worksheet, read the list of words and tell the students to repeat after you.

is sick sit Mrs. (“missiz”) listen

it`s think miss ticket minutes

fifteen beginning if quick film

begins fifty interesting

William Quick! Or we’ll miss the ______________ of the film!

Instructions for teachers. Give the worksheet to the students, play the song, give them time to finish and then check the answers by asking the students to participate.

/u/

Worksheet

1. Listen to the song. Fill the spaces located behind the words in bold with

the sound that you hear. Important: fill them with a phoneme.

Who you are by Jessie J.

I stare at my reflection in the mirror

Why am I doing this to myself?

/ /

Losing my mind on a tiny error,

/ /

I nearly left the real me on the

shelf.

No, no, no, no...

Chorus

Don't lose who you are in the blur

of the

/ // // /

stars!

Seeing is deceiving, dreaming is

believing,

It's okay not to be okay.

Sometimes it's hard to follow your

heart.

Tears don't mean you're losing,

/ /

everybody's bruising,

/ /

Just be true to who you are!

/ /

(who you are [x11] )

Brushing my hair, do I look perfect?

/ /

I forgot what to do to fit the mold,

yeah!

The more I try the less is working,

yeah

Cause everything aside me

screams

No, no, no, no, no, no,no,no...

Chorus

Yes, no's, egos, fake shows, like

BOOM,

/ /

Just go and leave me alone!

Real talk, real life, good luck,

goodnight,

With a smile, that's my home!

That's my home, yeah, yeah...

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

yeah...

Chorus

/U/ and /u/

Instructions for teachers: Give worksheets 1 and 2 to the students, give them instructions, and tell them that this is an activity to do at home. This is a metacognition activity.

Worksheet 1

1. Read the text. Then, record yourself and finally evaluate yourself and

reflect on the activity using the following questionnaire.

Text to record:

Luke looked outside his house and he saw something strange. He pulled the

door and saw that his pool was full of frogs. He couldn`t move and he said

to himself: I’m dreaming, no this is true. He didn’t know what to do. Then, he

opened his eyes and realized that everything was a dream. He felt like a

fool.

Worksheet 2

Questionnaire: 1. Did you have problems pronouncing the words with the sounds /u/ and /U/ ?

Yes No

2. Could you identify which words had the /u/ sound and which words had the

/U/ sound? Yes No

3. Did you learn something new with this type of activity? Yes No

4. How many mistakes did you make? 1 2 More than 2

Write them in this box and mention why you think you made those mistakes.

5. Did you notice after the activity that you have monitoring abilities?

Yes No

6. Did you felt comfortable while doing this exercise? Yes No

7. If you answered no. Did that factor affected your pronunciation? Yes

No

8. Do you have any questions regarding this activity? Yes No

If you answered yes write them in this box

Pronunciation is very important in the process of learning the

English as second language. Not only because knowing about

the phonemes, rhythm, and intonation help us improve our

pronunciation skills, but also because it helps us to be more

confident when talking in English. Because of the importance of

pronunciation, pronunciation teachers have an important goal in

their classes: try their best to teach students effectively how to

improve their skills. To do that, there are several methods that

teachers can use.

The audiolingual method is one of those ways to teach

pronunciation. Audiolingualism is a method that focuses on the

oral part. By different activities like for

example repetition drills, dialogues,

guided oral presentations,

and role plays, teachers can

teach using this method that is

very effective.

Teachers can teach also with the metacognition method that is a

very new method but very effective. Metacognition is to be

aware of your thoughts and monitor your thinking. So how can

teachers apply this in classes? Usually, metacognition activities

are for students to do them at home, but they can also be applied

in classes. The idea is students can analyze how they perform in

an activity, so here are some ideas. Teachers can give them a text

to record at home and then, they have to use the guidelines given

by the teacher to self-evaluate their work. Also, after an activity in

class the teacher can give them some questions or guidelines and

discuss them. Journals are a very important part of metacognition

method; with this they can also analyze their pronunciation

mistakes and strengths.

You can be very creative when delivering a class of pronunciation.

You can use songs, games, transcriptions, and all I mention before.

Don`t use only one method teachers, switch from one method to

another or mix methods, be creative! And the most important

thing: enjoy your lessons.

By María José Marín

Nowadays a lot of English teachers really focus on teaching about

grammar, but what happen with the student’s pronunciation? In

this month editions me and another expert are going to talk about

this issue. First of all, how is the teaching method in schools? The

professor enters the class starts to lecture all the students about

new English topics or review the last ones. Later the class do some

activities, the professor leaves homework for them to do at home

and next class the cycle starts again. But where is the

pronunciation? If a student says “bery” instead of saying “very”

the teacher won’t say anything because they are so similar that

saying it that way won’t interfere in communication.

There are several ways for a professor to teach pronunciation, but

the first thing we need to talk about is “metacognition”. If you are

not familiar with the topic we are going to briefly explain it.

Metacognition means think about you thoughts. What does this

have to do with teaching pronunciation you may say? Is easy! If

your students realize that they are saying something wrong they

will try to correct it. There are certain activities that you can use

when teaching a class and also a lot of materials to go with them.

Teaching pronunciations is an important part of the class so first of

all you need to make time in your classes to focus on just

pronunciation.

Really colorful charts are really helpful for newbie students. They

feel really happy when the see something that isn’t like all the

structure grammar lessons, and they also feel more relax. The

emotive filter in high school students sometimes is really high so

they don’t feel comfortable speaking in English in front of their

peers so, if you do playful activities this filter may go down. If you

do a little game and if someone lose they have to face a

challenge it’ll be easier for them to speak in English without the

fear of make a mistake.

Activities, charts, songs, challenges and all this kind of games are

really useful because students (doesn’t matter what age they are)

have fun with them while playing with their partners. I hope this

few tips will help you in you classes

By Anthony Josué Meléndez Mora

Be creative

Listen to your students

Know your students

Find new ways to introduce a topic

Take your time to explain the topic

Be patient

Be careful to be as same in and out the class

Not always use the board

Do a lot of practices

Be creative María José Marín Padilla

and Anthony Josué Meléndez Mora

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