I’m working with students who have special needs in learning English. They are ESL learners. My goal is to improve their accent/pronunciation. For example, I found that most Asian students often miss the ending sounds like “s” or “t” when speaking English. I would like to know some of the speaking problems that your English learners have (Spanish or Asian) and your teaching strategies in helping them to improve. :?: Thank you.
Missing endings is a common problem with amost all the second language learners I meet. These endings come by awfully fast in speech, and many learners pick up quickly on the fact that English is very forgiving and you can “get by” without all those silly details. French, Arabic, and other students do it too. Of course later this habit of ignoring details comes back and causes them huge trouble, but how does a beginner know that?
I repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and insist constantly that the students pronounce the word *with* the ending. It is tiring all around but if you stick to it, they will slowly, very slowly, start to pay attention to these things. You have to be consistent and insistent — don’t let it slide.
My adult Chinese students one and all had a terrible time with English pronunciation; they had been taught in China by Chinese speakers, and had several years of modelling on incorrect pronunciation. I had a hard time making a dent in this. If you have children all day in class you should be able to do better.
One thing I noticed was that the Chinese focused on different aspects of pronunciation than the English-speakers do. English meaning is carried 80% and more by the consonants (if you have ever seen or used speed-writing, which consists of writing only the consonants, you will know how this works). On the other hand, when I teach French, I have a long uphill battle getting English-speakers to listen to the vowels, which carry far more meaning in French than in English. In French, the sounds of short a and short e and long ay alone are words, “a” means (he, she, it) “has” and short “e” means (he, she it) “is” and “ay” means “and”. This differentiation takes months of work — and years to unteach if students were allowed to start off wrong. In Chinese and some other Asian languages, there are tones that carry meaning, and the vowels seem to carry a lot of meaning, while the consonants are far less distinct than in English. Many of my students made absolutely no distinction between s and sh, and that one is easy for us to understand although we find it odd. Many also made no distinction between l and n, which to an English speaker seems quite strange, although if you make the two sounds l and n and feel the position of your tongue in your month you will realize they are surprisingly close. Since these distinctions were meaningless to my students, they *heard* no difference at all between see and she, between net and let, not and lot, just for a few examples. Worse yet they had been *taught* to pronounce v as w and they had the very soft almost nonexistent British r, so the city Vancouver became Walcoowah, urk! And again they could not *hear* what was different between their pronunciation and mine.
Just to make things worse, apparently there is a famous professor of ESL in China who has a new exciting miracle way of teaching conversational English, and his theory is to speak as fast as possible, so the students just run their mispronunciations together like an auctioneer, urk again.
Your students may have had some of this bad introduction and may be copying their parents’ accents, so you may have some of this to overcome too, although hopefully less.
I got the *vowel and consonant charts* from phonovisual.com — an *excellent* resource — don’t care all that much for their other stuff but these charts are great. Very reasonably priced. Get the two wall charts for the class, and it is nice to give the students individual charts. What is especially nice about these charts is that they are organized in *linguistic* order — top line is lip sounds p, b, m; second line is tongue-tooth sounds t, d, n; and so on; first column is unvoiced stops (poppers) and sibilants (hissers) p, t, s, sh, k, h; second column is voiced (hummed) equivalents b, d, z, _, g, _; third is nasals m, n, ng, and so on. And the vowel chart shows the two or three most common spellings for each vowel sound. Very helpful.
I taught these charts directly, going over a line or a column in detail with the students making the sounds with me. Then as we were reading — I do a lot of oral reading always — or conversing, I referred to the charts when pronunciation issues came up. This did help, although slowly as I was breaking adult long-term habits. You could get much farther with kids — if they are under age ten, down to little or no accent in most cases.
Assume it is teachable, teach directly, do work gradually step by step with beginners, but don’t accept barely enough to sort of get by once they are past beginning.