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11.1.6. Sound practice

Kelly, in his work entitled How to Teach Pronunciation, gives examples of copious practice activities devoted to the production of sounds. Those activities are accompanied by a set of suggestions that the author himself calls ‘learner-friendly’ explanations.

The practising of individual sounds can take a number of forms,

e.g.:

a)    the adoption of minimal pairs, i.e. “pair of words which only differ in one feature, e.g. sing, song; park, bark; loose, lose; ship, sheepP (Doff, 1988:116). Teachers can resort to the use of minimal pairs to focus on differences in either vowel or consonant sounds.

Minimal pairs

1    2

hill    heli

bill    beli (based on    Doff,    1988)

Listen and say the number 1    or 2.

Say the words ‘bill’ and ‘beli’ in any order a number of times for students to name the number of the word each time, e.g.: beli - two, bill — one, bill — one, etc.,

Say other words containing the same sound and leamers name the number, e.g.: hill - one, tell - two, well - two, etc.

Harmer (2001:188) suggests another approach where students listen to the model and have to select between two altematives one of which completes the sentence. Without listening both options make sense so leamers cannot guess, they need to discriminate between two similar sounds, e.g.:

Smali shops / chops are very expensive.

The dishes / ditches need cleaning.

She enjoys watching / washing the children.

b)    the use of missing words. This techniąue demands from the teacher to produce “short sentences or phrases in which one word is missing. The students guess the word, which contains the sound that the teacher wishes to practise” (Doff, 1988:116). It can take the form of either the teacher reading the sentences and asking students to complete them or giving the written input to be read out loud.

e.g.: After April comes... (May).

Children love to ... (play) games.

Black and white together make .. .(grey).

c)    Students can also be asked to make sentences. Words are put on the board and students are to choose the words and make sentences with them, e.g.:

Make tree sentences. In each sentence, use one word from group 1 and one word from group 2.

Group 1    Group 2

last fast calm    farm part rabbit

dark black glad    party jar car

marvellous bad    hat man

Sentences, e.g.: She drives a black car. (based on Doff, 1988)

d)    games lend themseWes to any type of practice, pronunciation included (based on Harmer, 2001:190-191). By means of the phonemic chart devised by Underhill (see 4. RP) teacher can ‘pronounce’ items, i.e. point to consecutive sounds constituting a word or item, and get students to say what they are. Similarly, sound bingo can be played. Sąuares need to be filled with sounds or “phonemically ‘spelt’ words instead of ordinary orthographic words”. Students cross out sounds or words they hear and as soon as all their sąuares are crosses off they cali out ‘bingo’. Noughts and crosses can be also used as a gamę practising sounds. Sometimes students can be asked to say ‘tongue-twisters’ that concentrate on a particular sound, e.g.: ‘She sells sea shells by the sea shore’. Once leamers get acąuainted with the phonemic alphabet they can play ‘odd man out’ in which one item does not fit the remaining in the group of five or four.

Lee in Language Teaching Games and Contests (1979:70-85) offers a whole array of pronunciation games, some of which include: fej The same or dijferent - where learners differentiate between minimal pairs, the teacher sąys two sentences and the learners haye to decide if they are the same or different:

T: ‘We began to think’

‘We began to sink’

Are they the same? Ben?

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