NEW Pronunciation Partner Activity - Took this from ESL 4 You. The students work with a partner to draw a picture, practicing to use their minimal pairs.
NEW Minimal Pairs - Tell me your phone number - I like this one. It's from one stop English using minimal pairs and phone numbers.
Pronunciation Journey – Teach how to pronounce those dreaded r’s and l’s, b’s and v’s. Then with the pronunciation journey sheet demo a few, and then have volunteers have a go.
Pronunciation
is one of those areas where students either seem to be really good or really
bad. There are good reasons for this. There are 3 main senses used when speaking
any language:
1. Visual (See and understand)
2. Aural (Hear and understand)
3. Kinetic (Feel or do and understand)
Japanese people and the Japanese language are very visual, whereas good
pronunciation requires a strong aural perspicacity. Most instructors use aural
exercises such as listen & repeat, tongue twisters and phonetics, and these
are valid and important exercises. However many students will not respond to
these as well as expected.
The trick is to reinforce these aural drills with visual exercises such as
drawing pictures of the facial positions when creating sounds, using a mirror to
help the student copy your facial movements and silent listen & repeat. This
allows the student to concentrate on form before actually trying to replicate
the sounds.
As with anything, try many different exercises until you find which ones each
individual student responds to most effectively
Pronunciation Tips
* For the proper voiced TH sound, I tell students to put their index finger on their lips like they were going to shush someone. If they say the sound properly, their tongue will touch that finger. It's an exaggeration, granted, but it helps get that tongue out.
* To make the "v" sound correctly I tell them to bite their lower lip and make the sound their keitai makes when it's on vibrate.
* In desperate situations I use this tip;
A
little trick that I have used over my thirty years teaching in Japan for
pronunciation problems concerning R and L can be useful for many students,
but not all.
Whoever invented romaji back when the first Gaijin started visiting Japan made a
mistake that set a pronunciation problem for generations. They used an R
when they should have used an L. Instead of ra ri ru le lo... it should
have been la li lu le lo. You can observe this common mistake whenever a
Japanese student with a pronunciation problem tries to say river, love, rubber,
restaurant, etc. They will almost always, from R and L recognition habit,
substitute the opposite sound. How often have you heard liver when it
should have been river, or lestaulant when it should have been restaurant, or
rove for love and lubber for rubber? And why not? They have been
associating the romaji sounds they've learned for Hiragana and katakana for R
and L. Try this with your next problem student... r does not = L... r=w...
write river as wiver on the board and have him read it or wubber... his
pronunciation may not be perfect and maybe closer to babytalk... but he will be
forming his tongue and mouth correctly and after he becomes accostomed to using
it and starts to speak without having to think about it, it should become
naturally refined into a proper R sound.
Of course there will still be some hard cases that will not be able to make the
change... and some who can read the word wiver on the board, but reads river as
liver when he sees it on paper... Ingrained habbits are hard to break... really
hard especially in adults.