A Pronunciation Idea

Here's a really simple pronunciation activity that I picked up recently from a fantastic presentation by Michelle Hanson in one of our Next Step monthly meetings.

It's based on something from Judy Gilbert’s book Teaching Pronunciation Using the Prosody Pyramid and I really like it because instead of starting pronunciation work with individual sounds- which, to be honest, don’t usually cause someone to be misunderstood- it starts with the bigger picture: how we organise what we say so that it's easy for somebody else to understand.

So, let's take a sentence like:

When I got home from work, I realised I'd left my phone in the office.

The first thing we do is divide this into thought groups. These might be clauses but they could also be prepositional or adverbial phrases – basically chunks of language that belong together:

When I got home from work / I realised / I'd left my phone/ in the office.

That's the bottom of Gilbert's pyramid: the thought group.

Then, within each thought group, there's usually a word that carries particular prominence - what Gilbert calls the focus word:

When I got home from WORK / I REALISED / I'd left my PHONE in the office.

And then we drill down further. Inside that focus word there's a stressed syllable.

So in realised: REalised.

And right at the top of the pyramid is what Gilbert calls the peak - essentially the vowel at the heart of that stressed syllable: /ɪə/

So we've gone from:
thought group → focus word → stressed syllable → peak vowel.

And this gives us a really useful way of using reading aloud for pronunciation practice.

Give your learners a short, natural text and let them mark it up.

First, where would they divide it into thought groups?

Then, which word should carry the main focus in each group?

Where's the stressed syllable in that word?

And finally, can they make that important vowel really clear?

Then they read it aloud.

Better still, let them listen to a recording first, mark what they actually hear and then try to reproduce it.

I think this can be helpful because it gives learners a logical structure to work with. We’re using reading aloud to practise the rhythm, prominence and chunking of real speech but it feels a bit less random than pronunciation teaching can sometimes feel.

Once they've practised it from a text, the next step is to encourage them to do this with other texts and hopefully this will help them to use the same features in more spontaneous speaking.

So thanks again to Michelle Hanson, who introduced me to this idea and if you're wondering what The Next Step is, it's my ongoing professional-development programme for English language teachers. We meet online every month, and sessions like Michelle's give teachers a chance to share ideas, experiences and practical classroom techniques with each other.

This one is definitely going into my teaching toolbox. Give it a try - and see what your learners do with it.