Hi All,
I hope someone who has more experience in teaching can help. I’m a very new ALT at a big junior high and one of my JTEs has asked me to help with the kid’s pronunciation he would also like them to sound more natural when they speak English. I am new at teaching ESL, I have done some work with intermediate adults but I was following a set book so I didn’t have to plan the progression.
After some research, I’m thinking of suggesting the following plan for the next few months left in the school year.
1. Introduce the phonemic chart and give each student a copy to keep in their file
2. Work on vowel sounds
3. Work on consonant sounds
4. Teach them about syllables and how to break down words
5. Teach minimal pairs
6. Teach ghost letters
7. Teach word stress
For each of these
\- Use worksheets
\- Use games
\- Show videos with pronunciation
Does anyone have resources or tips on how to approach this in the best way? Any guidance will be appreciated.
14 comments
Use a textbook. Honestly, why reinvent the wheel, especially when you’re not very experienced at teaching and need guidance? There are lots of good textbooks on the market, and you don’t have to follow them directly. You can just get ideas and games from them.
You can also read up on the intricacies of pronunciation features and what should be taught. I’d recommend “How to Teach Pronunciation” and Adrian Underhill’s Sound Foundations and Mark Hancock’s Pronunciation Games.
Do not give Japanese students a phonetic chart… It’ll overwhelm them and make them lose interest, in turn making your life hard.
The most important thing here is… how much time are you being given to do this?
Going by past experience, this is likely to be a five-minute period of time, so be prepared for that.
It’s too bad he decided to let you have a shot at this halfway through the school year. It would be much more effective had you started this in April. Or are you on the JET programme?
You might want to look in to speech therapy on top of the standard phonics/phonetics practices. Exercises that open up and enable more control of all the parts of the vocal pathway have been really effective for me, and I’ve gotten some good advice from a couple of friends that are speech pathologists.
At the end of the day, one of the biggest issues with Japanese speakers’ pronunciation in English is a lack of muscle/control of a few essential movements that are mostly or totally absent in their L1. Targeted exercises can help more than more general ones that tend to be passed around in textbook for language education.
Good luck!
I taught phonics at at primary teacher in the UK and now teach it as an ALT in Junior High. I use 10 minutes at the start of each lesson.
One of my biggest challenges has been that many of the resources available are aimed at much younger children. That said, I still use the ‘Jolly Phonics’ order of teaching phonemes as they start with the most commonly used and work up to more complex sounds.
The best advice I received when researching this last year was firstly to teach blending and segmenting from the start. Model both for students and make sure they have opportunities to apply them.
Secondly, make sure students can see the purpose of the activities, e.g. decoding new words, faster and more accurate reading, better spelling. My students still love games but I’ll throw in plenty of reading and spelling activities as well.
Lastly, the resources in the classroom may not be quite suitable but there’s usually a way around it. In the UK I used individual whiteboards and markers a lot so children could write and erase quickly. Scrap paper from the teachers’ room works here. We do have touchscreen TVs so that helps for online games. I’m definitely a fan of including phonics in the classroom, and after 2 terms I’ve noticed an improvement.
See if you can get your hands on a copy of Well Said by Linda Grant. It’s been a super helpful resource in my uni classes, and it would probably be good for middle schoolers too! Lots of activities and explanations of the various components of pronunciation.
Hi OP. I teach a speaking class for 1st grade JHS students. We do a phonics cycle at the start of each lesson. If you want to know how I do it, my DMs are open
Ask your JTE if there is a specific focus he/she would like to address. Something like l vs r, or the “th” sound. In an ideal world that focus would be built into the lesson in other ways as well. Assuming your ALT experience was a lot like mine, your showtime is probably slim. Make it count by having a focus. Textbooks are a great start, but at the end of the day the lesson is built by the JTE. Consult them before starting that kind of thing. Rubrics and visuals also help. Some websites can be useful if tech is available in the classroom. Shadowing and self-checking are great techniques to use as well.
TLDR: find out what exactly the JTE is looking for and go from there. If you have a great resource, suggest it first.
Like others are saying, don’t hand out a phoneme chart. That’s for you, not the students.
If your JTE wants you to create whole lessons around phonology, get *Ship or Sheep* or a book like it. But I don’t teach much in the way of lesson activities built around phoneme pronunciation training in JHS and my students seem to do alright. Your students are going to figure out a lot on their own without needing instruction, so your pronunciation training should really focus on what they can’t get on their own as it comes up in class.
People make a lot of hay about Japanese L1 learners not usually distinguishing /l/ vs. /r/ or /b/ vs. /v/, and those pairs do need some work, but honestly, how many minimal pairs for those sounds share the same context? It might be embarrassing to be caught ordering “flied lice” but you’ll never actually get served it. So if I do short phoneme awareness-raising activities for those sounds in JHS, it’s usually focused on trying to get students to recognize the sounds and their spelling correspondences. They’ll figure out those pairs’ articulation on their own, or if they don’t, it probably won’t matter too much. And if a student really wants to polish their phoneme pronunciation for a high-stakes speech or something, we can target that one-to-one after school.
What I find JHS students need nearly daily work on are things like rhythm, intonation, stress (and timing), consonant clusters for in-word connection and how (and when) to connect sounds between words within a sentence. Those are the areas that make-or-break student speech in terms of being good English or an incomprehensible mush of sounds. And while you might not need lectures about those features specifically or whole lessons specifically built around them (except as interventions that come up as needed), you can make constant awareness raising about them a part of your teaching practice.
This is getting pretty long so I’ll let you dive into the rabbit hole of how to teach those features of pronunciation, but I would say the absolute most important things for you to do when teaching are to consistently model authentic stress, rhythm and timing, and intonation when you speak to students and to give them daily chances to speak and grapple with those problems on their own. I have watched ALTs who strip out authentic stress or rhythm when they try to speak slowly or who speak in affected, sing-song intonations (to be “fun”) or monotones (to be “clear”) because they think they’re making their English easier for Japanese students to understand, to the point that I have heard ALTs model sentences like, “I. took. bus. to. station.” for what would naturally be said like “i(/ə)TOOK əBUS təthəSTATION”. And what those ALTs didn’t understand was that they weren’t making their English easier to understand, they were denying their students the chance to learn English.
There is another thing to keep in mind, one I sometimes point out to adults, too.
It is not the end of the world if you can’t pronounce things like a native.
What they really need is to develop the ear and gain context. Example:
>That’s an ugly hat!
>
>I agree!
After all, agree and ugly sound exactly the same until you really get an ear for it, and are very difficult for your average Japanese student to pronounce correctly. a greeeee ug ly!
Make it fun!
This is a really tall order to teach kids. Learning pronunciation is boring and difficult. It’s all about tongue/mouth position and controlling where in the throat/torso the sound comes from. They won’t be able to do it perfectly, so don’t take it so seriously. Just make it fun and if they are close enough to the correct pronunciation, call it a win!
Teaching each vowel and consonant will be boring for them and difficult for you. Maybe just choose a few tricky ones, like r, th, v, and make it funny.
Hi there, this post is a few months old now but I stumbled across it so thought I’d comment.
I agree with what some others have said that probably the most important thing Japanese learners need is work on stress, intonation, rhythm, speaking up, and reducing unnecessary katakana.
I teach (mostly) freshmen uni students in Japan and they struggle with the same things. I created a ‘[core pronunciation’ playlist](https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDJGydi8OydvoD51hVmUqETQwz7gQboYh) for my students to go through (in their own time) that I’m sure you could get some ideas from to use in class. Each vid has an activity
Check it out. Hopefully it can be of use.