TESL: Monday Morning Lesson Plan

Here is a quick Monday morning lesson plan for you English teachers
out there. Today we are working on
pronunciation. Have you corrected your
students’ pronunciation 500 times? Is
the only tangible result frustration on both parts? Today we are launching our pronunciation series
to help you out.

Many students have never formally studied
pronunciation. Without this base in
English phonetics, all of your corrections probably seem arbitrary if not
cruel. You do have to concede that, to
the uninitiated, the spoken language can be pretty hazardous territory. Simple example: one, two, three. How do we get a “W” sound in “one”? Then why do we completely ignore the “W”
sound in “two”? Luckily, three is quite
rule-abiding, but before you know it we are at “four” and students are asking
about that silent “U” character lurking about.
And so the language goes.

We hope the pronunciation series calms everyone’s nerves. For the students, often just seeing evidence of a coherent English pronunciation system is a welcome relief. Today we deal with some of the
most common mistakes: ‘B’ versus ‘V’, ‘CI’ and ‘CE’, and ‘R’.

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