Teaching phonetics in the English classroom

As an English teacher it is important to have knowledge of how the English sounds are pronounced, how we produce these sounds and how we in the best possible way can teach the sounds in the classroom. Furthermore, as a Norwegian English teacher you have to know which sounds the Norwegian learners find tricky. To keep this competence up to date it is vital to have some regular refill of research, teaching ideas and relevant literature. I have been so fortunate to receive input this year at Høgskolen I Østfold and now it was time to share some of the things I have learned with my colleagues at Os school.

I held a presentation at my school Thursday the 27^th of March. I teach English in year 1 and 2 and at my presentation there were two teachers that teach English in years 3 - 4 and three teachers that teach English in years 5-7 and our inspector. I had made a PowerPoint and also wanted to focus on showing my colleagues some teaching activities that they could use in the classroom.

The topic of the presentation and the following discussion was related to speech sound acquisition. I had read a very interesting article by Charles Jannuzi, Sounds problematic (2013). This article was the background for my presentation. The article dealt mainly with difficulties Japanese learners had learning the English /r/. To make the presentation relevant to my colleagues I focused on some English sounds that are difficult for the Norwegian learners. I still kept the main point from the article but from a Norwegian viewpoint. I especially paid attention to the part of the article with the different teaching activities. I wanted to show them  how you can work with phonetics in the  classroom by giving them examples of teaching activities and  show them how you can get the students participation.

In the presentation I talked about one of the most common difficulty in English phonetics for Norwegian learners, the distinction between /v/ and/ w/. I started the presentation by pointing out some of the reasons for starting with the consonants when teaching phonetics:

 

First, consonants contribute more to making English understood than vowels do. Second, consonants are easier to describe and understand. Native speakers of English from different parts of the world have different accents, but the difference of accent is mainly the result of differences in the sound of the vowels; the consonants are pronounced in very much the same way wherever English is spoken. So if the vowels you use are imperfect it will not prevent you from being understood, but if the consonants are imperfect there will be a great risk of misunderstanding. (O’Connor, 1980, p 24)

I then pointed out a common mistake Norwegians make when pronouncing English: Norwegians often mix-up the fricative /v/ in English with the approximant /w/. I then showed how a lesson plan teaching the sounds /v/ and /w/ could look like. I also talked about how we should choose to focus on one sound at a time to give the pupils a chance to learn how to pronounce the specific sounds correctly before contrasting them in minimal pairs. I also gave them some examples of minimal pairs with the sounds /f/, /v/ and /w/. However, it is imperative to not only use the words that are in minimal pairs when you teach a sound. You can use words from the students’ textbooks, words that the children come up with themselves, frequent English words, especially useful English words and English loan words that we have in Norwegian. That is to say, you have to use a wide variety of words. If you also speak of the content and the function of the words you can give an added lexical focus to the lessons. At the end of the presentation I showed them the teaching activities that are mentioned in Charles Jannuzis’ article.

Next there was time for some discussion, the conversation was in Norwegian. We discussed how much time we use for phonetics in our English lessons. When you teach year 1-4 in English you may feel that you don’t spend that much time on phonetics. But we all agreed, after some debate, that really we do; every time you teach new vocabulary you focus on pronunciation. So from the very start, from year 1, you teach phonetics. We pronounce new vocabulary and get the children to repeat. We correct wrong pronunciation be repeating the word correctly and we tell the pupils to focus on our mouth to see how we “shape” the sounds. All of this is phonetics; it’s not something that you need to have separate classes for. You can take ten, twenty minutes out of your English lesson, that’s enough. But we all decided that we could structure the phonetics better, with better plans over which sounds we teach and when.

The teachers that teach year 5-7 really appreciated the teaching activities, although some of the activities were already in use. They especially liked the student participation part of the activities. They also were surprised that it was so important to teach each sound separately before working with minimal pairs, they usually worked with minimal pairs the same lesson the sounds were introduced.

It was not easy to keep the presentation in English. I also found it really difficult to find a suitable time to have the presentation. Even so, it was nice to be able to share some of my newly required phonetics competence with my colleagues. We don’t really have many meeting points discussing subjects; we all appreciated the opportunity to reflect upon how we teach phonetics in our English lessons. Despite our busy schedules it was time well spent.

Sources:

Jannuzi, Charles. (2013). Sounds Problematic. English Teaching Professionals, (88), 46- 49

Nilsen, Thor Sigurd, & Rugesæter, Kåre N.(1999). Basic English Phonetics for Teachers. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget.

O’Connor, J. D. (1980). Better English Pronunciation. Cambridge University Press