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      TeachingEnglish
      teaching english phonemes
      Submitted by mikey83 on 23 February, 2010 - 10:19

      I was wondering if someone could psossibly help me with this querstion as I am a little stuck with understanding it I am half way through my teaching course but this is what stands in my way.

      Here is the question

      Imagine you are teaching the phonemes /l/ and /r/. Your aim is to help your students distinguish between the two sounds and pronounce them as accurately as possible. Remind yourself of the stages of teaching sounds you covered in the learning module and describe step by step how you would teach these sounds. Remember to give details of a communicative activity at the end. Write about 200 words

      If anyone could please help me it would be greatly apprieciated.

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      sidhaye's picture
      sidhaye
      teaching phonemes
      Submitted on 27 February, 2010 - 04:32

      I had found the excercises in Ann Baker's book quite useful for this activity.

      cmftrier's picture
      cmftrier
      Make reference to different students' L1s
      Submitted on 2 September, 2010 - 05:52

      I think you will have to make reference to different students' L1s. If in their L1, they don't have both these sounds or do not distinguish between them, then the task of teaching the different is of course more problematic.Michael Swan's "Learner English" will give you a good indication of this for various languages.

      For other languages where the sounds exist but are pronounced  a bit differently (e.g. /r/ is articulated further back in the mouth in German than in English) then the task is more about illustrating to them the differences between English and their L1 and lots of practise work with contrasting pairs. Of course you can do these activities with students who don't have the phonemes in their L1, but it may take more time or need more detailed introduction. I suppose for them, the first main obstacle is hearing in the difference in the first place. But for those who can hear it and need to be able to refine their production of the sounds, I find getting them to repeat "dldldldldldld" and "drdrdrdr" will help them to feel where the tongue should bein the mouth to produce /l/ and /r/ and you can show the diagrams of how speech organs move, as well. From there you can do minimal pairs, listening tasks, bingo etc.

      CMF