For many teachers, the very heart of pronunciation is the set of individual sounds in the target language. Yes, there is stress, intonation and connected speech too, but sounds feel more basic. However, they are also frustratingly difficult to deal with in class, and hard to integrate with other topics in the lesson. They can also leave the teacher feeling dis-empowered, especially teachers whose own accent is not like standard accents often presented in text books. It’s easy to see why this aspect of pronunciation is often neglected in the language class. In what follows, I would like to outline in a bit more detail three kinds of problems teachers have with individual phonemes, and then go on to suggest some practical solutions to these problems.
PROBLEMS
1 Accent issues
Accent issues play a part in discouraging teachers from dealing with individual sounds in class. Sometimes, pronunciation sections in books seem to assume all learners need to master RP (Received Pronunciation: a standard British accent) or GA (General American). This is particularly noticeable with vowel sounds. For example, your text book might present the ‘correct’ pronunciation for bath as having the long A sound (like art), implying that the short A sound (like cat) is wrong for this word. If the goal of the class is intelligibility, then this kind of accent-bias is totally unnecessary – the short A sound would be perfectly intelligible. Perceived accent-bias in pronunciation materials can also be very alienating for teachers whose own accent is non-standard.
2 Mixed needs
Another problem with teaching individual sounds is relevance to the learners’ needs. One student may find a particular sound difficult while the next has no problem with it at all. This problem is especially acute in classes with mixed first languages. If you teach the distinction between /r/ and /l/ for your Japanese learners, it will be irrelevant for their European classmates. Even if all your class share the same mother tongue, your coursebook may not provide material on their specific L1 issues, since such materials are often intended for a wider market than just one country. To provide targeted pronunciation activities, you will probably need to step away from the coursebook and source your material elsewhere.
3 Unconnected fragments
Sounds are difficult to fit into the storyline of a lesson. Many teachers like lessons to have a good sense of flow, some kind of narrative linking one part of the lesson to the next. But whatever your class is about, it’s unlikely to create an obvious need for a section on ship and sheep. That’s because there is no direct connection between phonemes and meaningful units of language like words and sentences. Topics rarely contain a large number of words featuring any particular sound. If you want to focus on a sound in class, it will usually have to be in a small, separate chunk of the lesson with no strong connection to the rest of it. This makes teaching segmental aspects of pronunciation feel bitty – a collection of random fragments.
SUGGESTIONS
1 Use minimal pairs
I’m going to suggest that taking a minimal pair approach to teaching pronunciation goes a long way to answering the accent issues problem. But first of all, I should make one assumption clear. I assume that for most pronunciation teachers around the world, our job is to help learners understand and be understood. In other words, the goal is intelligibility rather than training them to sound like a native. This is important, because you can be intelligible without sounding like a native.
What are the implications of this assumption? Well, it means that learners do not have to acquire sounds which are exactly the same as the standard model. For example, the vowel in the word gate does not have to be identical to the RP or GA diphthong. What’s important is that it should be different from other phonemes, for example, the vowel in get.
This is the strength of minimal pair activities: they switch the focus away from the individual sound and onto the contrast between a phoneme pair, such as gate-get. The basic message is this: it doesn’t matter what accent you have, as long as you can make the important contrasts. This message is so different from implying that learners must sound like the queen (or any other idealized native speaker). You can sound like yourself.
2 Put minimal pairs in groups
A good way to make your pronunciation lesson relevant to a mixed group of learners is to focus on a set of related pairs rather than a single pair. Take for example the set of words beat, bait, bite, bit, bet, bat. We could call this a minimal group. Within this group, there are a range of different challenges. Some learners may find it difficult to distinguish beat-bit; others may have no problem with this, but instead have a problem with bait-bet, or with bet-bat. By focusing on a minimal group, hopefully, there’s something for everybody.
For all the learners, even those who have no specific problem with any of the pairings, there is also the benefit of seeing how these vowel phonemes work together as a system, allowing them to be compared and contrasted. This connects the individual minimal pairs to the bigger picture, making the pronunciation segment of your class seem less fragmented, or bitty. This goes some way to offering a solution to problem 3 above: although it doesn’t help to integrate your pronunciation section to the topic of the rest of the lesson, it does make it more weighty chunk in its own right. You could also introduce some kind of phoneme syllabus, having a different phoneme group at regular intervals. Here is a suggestion of some groups you could cover (Hancock 2024):
Consonants
– The P group (lip consonants): pea, bee, fee, V, we
– The T group (tongue and gum consonants): tear, deer, cheer, jeer, year
– The S group (sibilants): sip, zip, ship, vision
– The K group (palate and throat consonants): cold, gold, hold, old
– The TH group (teeth consonants): thin, tin, fin, sin, then, den, Venn, zen
– The L group (liquids): light, right, night
– The N group (nose consonants): sun, sum, sung, sunk
Vowels
– The E group (front vowels): beat, bait, bite, bit, bet, bat
– The A group (open vowels): caught, coat, cot, cat, cut
– The U group (rounded vowels): foul, foal, fool, full, gull
– The R vowel group (vowels before ‘r’): steer, stair, star, store, stir
Hancock, M. (2024), PronPack: The Minimal Pair Collection Hancock McDonald ELT