For all of you EFL teachers out there that struggle with teaching pronunciation to your students, here’s an excellent method from Macmillan that is very easy to teach and easy for students to understand. This video confirmed that I was doing some of the right things which is putting emphasis on the physical and less on the intellectual of pronunciation, but I’ve got a lot more work to do to get to the level of teaching in this video. Adrian Underhill is the author of Sound Foundations: Learning and Teaching Pronunciation. He has been a successful teacher and trainer for many years. While working with Macmillan, he has equally participated as an advisor in the development of the New Macmillan Dictionary. He’s worked regularly in teacher development and was a past president of the IATEFL, www.iatefl.org ,where he started a teacher development interest group. Enjoy! It’s great fun and a wonderful discovery of English pronunciation for everyone, not just teachers. If you don’t have time to watch the full video, skip to 0:55:55 at the end. There you’ll see the results of the method. Brilliant!
Amazing, It does not sound easy to teach this way.
What I find the most difficult (today as in the past) is that sounds’symbols look like letters and sound different. My way of progressing in pronunciation was ; imitating.
Good luck with it…
Focus on how to place the tongue, the lips, and jaw. The phonetic symbols come easier when looking for words in the dictionary. I always focus on those thngs with my students. Now I can perfect it with this method.