Teaching pronunciation

[orangutan]

I would like to ask what activities and resources people have found useful in teaching English pronunciation and improving accent, intonation etc.

I have put the question in this section because I am not looking so much for advice on phonetics and phonology but on actual teaching / learning methods.

 

[birdeen's call]

I teach English only occasionally, but I know of one person (besides me, so two actually) who found this helpful. As for methods and other resources, I'm afraid I'm not in position to give advice.

 

[orangutan]

Thank you, there are some useful things there.

I was thinking especially of things like different kinds of drills and the rationale behind them.

No real reason why this should be confined to English teaching by the way; I would be interested in things people have found useful in learning any langauges.

 

[I'm With Stupid]

A lot of it depends on the nationality you're teaching and the individual problems they have with the language. Vietnamese learners always miss final vowel sounds, so I do a lot of work on catenation, which works really well.

 

[Tdol]

I agree- what are the sort of problems Russian learners have?

 

[orangutan]

I agree too, of course, but I was trying to generalize the question.

With Russian students I am most conscious at the moment (I am quite new here) of problems with several particular phonemes, and then more subtle problems of stress and intonation.