Teaching Pronunciation, the goal of instruction is threefold:

SPEAKING

The teaching of speaking is not an easy task as you believe it to be, it endures hard work and patience from the teacher.

Teaching Pronunciation, the goal of instruction is threefold:

• To enable our students to understand and be understood
• To build their confidence in entering communicative situations and
• To enable them to monitor their own speech based on input from the environment

In the past, pronunciation instruction usually focused on the articulation of consonants and vowels and the discrimination of minimal

Pairs. In recent years, the focus has shifted to include a broader emphasis on suprasegmental features such as stress and intonation.

Dalton and Seidlhofer list six communicative abilities related to pronunciation:

• Prominence: how to make salient the important points we make
• Topic management: how to signal or recognize where one topic ends and another begins
• Information Status: how we mark what we assume to be shared knowledge as opposed to something new
• Turn-taking: when to speak, and when to be silent, how to lead the floor to somebody else
• Social meanings and roles: how to position ourselves with our interlocutors in terms of status
• Degree of involvement: how to convey our attitudes, emotions

Traditionally, the sound system has been described and taught in a building block fashion:

 

Sounds           syllables                       phrases and thought groups          extended discourse

Thought Groups:

In natural discourse, we use pauses to divide our speech into manageable chunks called thought groups.

Prominence:

Within each thought group, there is generally one prominent element, syllable that is emphasized, usually by lengthening it and moving the pitch up or down.

The prominent element depends on context but generally represents information that is either

1. new
2. in contrast to some other previously mentioned information.
3. Or simply the most meaningful or important item in the phrase.

Intonation

Thus far, we have looked at how speech was divided up into thought groups marked by pauses, and how within each thought group one prominent element is usually stressed.

Intonation pattern do vary but certain general patterns prevail.

Most teachers find difficulty in teaching speaking because of the following reasons:

·         Time consuming

·         Subjective scoring

·         Unstable language sample

Pro achievement speaking test:

        Achievement base

        Proficiency base

Teachers want test that are:

1. Systematic and time efficient
2. Achievement based
3. Less subjectively scored

Different types of tests:

• Authentic tests- taught and tested in class rooms
• Periodic tests- topic lessons are put together and after the whole year given to the students as their final exams

Prepared by:

RVQ

                                                                                                                        ABLL 4