How to Teach English Pronunciation in The Esl Classroom

Learning a new language can be quite a mammoth and daunting task for many students of English. There are many factors to take into account, grammar, sentence construction past tenses, verbs just to name but a few. Then after all that the students find themselves with the task of actually producing the language and pronouncing it!

Try putting yourself in their position, or perhaps you’ve been in this kind of situation before? Learning a foreign language at night school or even on your own. You’ll certainly be able to fully appreciate the difficulties that might befall the students. The frustration of not being able to catch what was said, let alone reproduce it and say it in the classroom!

Your students might even feel too frightened to produce a simple utterance in case they make an embarrassing mistake in front of all their classmates and look silly. After all who wants to be the class clown?

The more your students feel this way, then the quieter your English class will be! And we all know how frustrating that can be to the teacher! The idea is to get the students talking, not you! The teachers job is just to help them along the way, by giving them guidance.

When one of your students makes an error, which they always will, try to put yourself in their shoes. If you wade in straight away with something as negative as, you are wrong! What do you think this does to the students confidence? In a nutshell not a great deal! In fact it might even make the student wary of trying again. Cast your mind back to when you first learned English when you were a kid. You frequently made lots of bloopers, but eventually after a lot of practice you finally got there.

Here’s one teaching approach you can use in your classroom

One of your students decides to answer a question you’ve put to him. Here’s one such example of how to correct student mistakes.

Teacher: What did you do yesterday Lek?

Lek: I go to the mall with my mum

                                   Teacher: I went to the mall with my mum. Is that right Lek? So where did you go yesterday Lek?

Lek: I went to the mall with my mum.

Teacher: Very good Lek.

When you take this approach to correcting errors. You make the students aware of their mistakes and the students can then correct themselves. This not only helps the students to increase in confidence, but also takes away the embarrassment of being constantly told that they’re wrong.

Correcting language errors this way is more beneficial and allows the learners to realize their mistakes and make corrections themselves. Another great way of getting your students to produce the target language whilst having fun at the same time is learning through tongue twisters. Below are a few popular ones I’ve used in my lessons, the students love them!

Which witch ordered which sandwich

Red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather

Swiss wristwatches, Swiss wristwatches

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Have fun!