When asked why they don’t teach more pronunciation, many teachers say they lack confidence and time. For them, adding pronunciation to the classroom mix requires planning, research, and practice. It can also be hard to find materials which step away from native-speaker models. In this session, we will simplify this common scenario by sharing the top five priorities for teaching English pronunciation. We will explore the best ways to meet our students’ needs and streamline our approach.
According to the video, the speaker Gemma Archer, an EAP teacher and program coordinator, shares her experiences on how to teach pronunciation in a global English classroom.
Here are the key takeaways from this video:
- It is more important to focus on international intelligibility than a native-like accent.
- Teachers should prioritize features that are important for international intelligibility such as sentence stress, word stress, consonant sounds, and vowel duration.
- There are resources available to help teachers with pronunciation instruction, such as the book Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World by Gemma Archer and Robin Walker.
- Teachers can use dictation software to check students’ pronunciation, but they should be aware that this technology is not perfect.
