Reflections: Pronunciation on the Prowl

 Pronunciation. Even the word itself isn’t easy on the tongue. In classes with lower proficiencies, I find myself correcting pronunciation a lot. However, this corrective feedback, even when it’s coupled with the students repeating your corrected verbalization of the word isn’t that helpful in improving their grasp of the problematic sound.  As we know from SLA and our phonology chart, it’s important learners understand exactly what they’re doing wrong and how to fix the core issues. After finishing my assigned unit, I finally had some free time to try out some of Harmer’s suggested pronunciation exercises on one of my intermediate-low classes.

            I decided to do Example 1 (“Ship and Chip”) on page 254 in the Harmer book, since I’ve had experience doing similar phoneme based exercises at my old job, and I could also work in dialogic tasks into it, since the exercise suggests identifying target sounds by asking students questions about activities. This fortuitously tied into my previous class, where we had been discussing ways to relax after a stressful test. Since my class has 40 students and I only had 20 minutes, it was hard to address their individual pronunciation concerns. As a result, I followed the book’s example with the focus on /ʃ/ and /tʃ/ sounds. As set-up I explained the placement of the tongue, teeth, lips and did some choral repetition with them following my lead of quickly alternating between “ch” and “sh” sounds, so we ended up sounding like a class full of beat-boxers.

            Once that was over, the first challenge I anticipated was getting the students involved and talking with each other. As middle-school teens, they’re shy and sometimes insecure of their L2 pronunciation in front of their peers. To keep their affective filter lowered and also to better monitor their output, I put them in 4 or 5 person groups and assigned them team-names that incorporated the phonemes we were focusing on (eg: Group 1 was “Watchmen”, group 2 was “Cash money”, group 3 was “Deadliest Catch”, etc). I didn’t have a recording of someone using “sh” and “ch” words interchangeably, so I modeled some sentences for them, some from the book and some of my own. Here, I ran into my first problem; lack of preparation. By speaking the sentences in my familiar and direct teacher-voice, I take away the passive and detached real-world element of an unfamiliar voice with no possibility of repetition or subconscious modification. If I had spent more time browsing YouTube in advance I’m sure I could have found examples that would have been relevant to this part of the exercise.

The other problem I discovered for this part of the exercise, was by having them work in groups they started competing against each other and shouting the answers over the other groups (“TEACHER! YOU SAID DISHES WITH ‘SH’ SOUND!!). As a consequence, the slower groups were being denied the chance to analyze the sounds and discover the answers on their own. All they had to do was wait for the alpha-groups to shout out the correct answers. Obviously I should have had them work out the answers quietly amongst their group members, as opposed to my sage-on-the-stage antics of mass elicitation.

            I stopped this part of the exercise and moved on pretty quickly to the next part of the exercise, but I modified it so each sentence contained both “ch” and “sh” sounds (“The chips and sandwich are on the dish,” “two people share one chair”, etc) which forces them to alternate between different sounds quickly and is a good way to practice avoidance of phoneme assimilation.  This I had them do in their groups and I walked around to monitor their progress.

            Finally, I tied in the dialogic exercise of having them talk about activities they enjoyed, recycling the previous class’s instructions about activities that help us relax. In addition to the numbering rank system depicted in Example 1’s model, I had them ask follow-up questions that depended on how enthusiastic or disinterested they were in the activity mentioned (eg: “what shows do you like to watch on TV?”, “why do you hate washing up?”). I modeled a spider-web of possible follow-up questions on the WB to help them along. I also reminded them of the ‘what, where, why, who, how’ format of questions. About five minutes into this part of the group-work, the bell for the end of class rang and I promised them I would test them on these sounds again the next class.

            As they filed out, I realized I didn’t really have the opportunity to observe any real production of the taught sounds. I had proctored and monitored the students while in class, but if a student had wished to just nod along with their group-members and refuse to participate I had no way of preventing that. I did encourage students as I went around, but there must be a better system to evaluate them individually, while still accommodating such a large class in such a small time-frame. Perhaps, in keeping with the ‘guide on the side’ ethos, I could have a group-leader grade the other students’ sounds, but how can I trust his or her objectivity and linguistic competence as an accurate barometer of their peers’ pronunciation? I felt satisfied in the fact that I had a fun class and kept them interested in the activities, but unsatisfied in terms of helping them acquire better pronunciation. Perhaps it did help them, but it’s hard to know how many it helped and to what extent when there’s not enough individual interaction. In anticipation for next week’s class with these students, I hope I can think of a way to more efficiently test them and evaluate their output.