TeachingEnglish
Teaching English Pronunciation in Pakistan
Submitted by Umaima Kamran on 17 June, 2009 - 13:43
I want to discuss differrent ways to teach correct English Pronunciation in Pakistan. As I personally feel that English Pronunciation is the neglected area in Pakistan. Only those students, who study from English medium schools, and are taught by teachers; who have good pronunciation; can pronounce English correctly. It means that not only students need to be taught English pronuncition as an important component in their syllabus but also Pakistani English teachers need some training in 'English Pronunciation'. What do you people think of?
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That's right that especially in Pakisan the English language teachers need to be accurate first of all by improving their pronunciation and then the whole numbers that are learning this language must be able to pronounce quite accurately but slowly and steadily.
The reason why they should do this is because when in England nobody, English people, understands what Pakistanis are saying and hence create a problem all over the country with their poor accent even if the speaker is MA English.
The other aspect regarding the English accent is that we do not even know the meaning of this word at the age of 30 and when come to know they are quite surprised with its meaning.
What is this? It, the English, as a subject they study for their whole lives but still unable to speak accurately.
There must be something done that this subject is taught as a foreign language.
I have been training students down south over the last four years and I find the same problem prevalent over here. I see highly qualified teachers making a complete mess of the English Language purely because of their strong mother tongue influence and wrong pronunciation. The English Language by itself has taken a back seat down here and students in spite of being aware of the repercussions it will have on their career have a lackadaisical approach.
As you rightly mentioned, teachers need to be trained first. The decision makers of all school or colleges need to address this problem urgently, since excellent command over Spoken and Written English has become the order of the day across all industries. People are still oblivious to the hard fact that the English Language is used globally for business purposes.
Hi,
Can you please tell of the different teaching strategies you adopted to teach pronunciation to adult learners and also how successful were they in helping learners improve their pronunciation?
Have you thought about further training for the teachers you work with? While they'll probably be a bit basic for most, online TEFL courses usually have quite in-depth modules about pronunciation. Try http://www.onlinetefl.com/ and http://www.cactustefl.com/ for details. The BBC World Service is also excellent for teachers and students to listen to in order to hear 'model' English pronunciation.
Hope that helps!
Unfortunately, most of the English language teachers in Pakistan who demonstrate inaccurate or inappropriate pronunciation while speaking or when it comes to teaching to their students may not been through a specific teacher training course that would empower their aptitude to overcome the area. It is indeed very much true that pronunciation is quite a neglected area, and at no time has there ever been a focus onto it since one would hardly find a language school where there are any native speakers serving as an ELT teacher. However, I strongly believe that it is not the case with every individual teachers. I have served at a local language school in Pakistan working as a language instructor, and I have always had major emphasis on teaching pronunciation. For instance, one can begin with phonemic symbol that can be followed by word stress and leading to sentence stress. It is just an example though every time I hear student pronouncing a word inaccurately, I instantly try to mend his mistake to ensure it doesn't happen next time.