A focus on more informal assessment is usually best: a teacher often learns more about student progress from just walking around her class and seeing how students are doing with yes/no questions and short answers, for example, (e.g., “Can you cook?” “Yes, I can”) than she will on a large midterm that covers a number of question types.
DISCREET SPEECH TIMER HOW TO
So how do you proceed in teaching your pronunciation class, and what do you focus on: stress and intonation patterns or discrete speech sounds? How to Teach Pronunciationģ Assess Frequently: Informally and Formallyįrequent assessment, both informal and formal, is required in an ESL class to monitor student progress and mastery. But clear articulation of individual speech sounds is also important. And the students’ or soldiers’ befuddlement was hilarious because its origin was not only in not understanding but also in thinking that they should be able to understand, they almost understood. More and more I was reminded of a Saturday Night Live routine in which a comedian, a very talented actor, used to play a teacher or a drill sergeant and come out give orders or ask questions of his troops or students, which the audience could recognize as questions or commands by the intonation patterns, but not specifically what the guy was saying because the specific speech sounds were so inaccurate. And I tried to ignore that even though they sounded native-like, approximately, I really couldn’t understand them. My students’ intonation and stress improved. I taught five or six kinds of sentence stress: information questions, yes/no questions, basic sentence stress for affirmative sentences, and so on. And so on.) Being a dutiful beginning teacher, I plowed on, teaching students to really stress those content words and reduce the structure or grammar words. If a student had mastered the basics of native-sounding stress and intonation in American English, then that was going to contribute much more to her overall general comprehensibility than whether or not her “r” or “th” sounds were clear.
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