Teaching Pronunciation – Speaking

SECTION 8-9
TEACHING PRONUNCIATION – SPEAKING

(PracTESOL: It’s Not What You Say, but How You Say It! – Developing Discussion Skills in the ESL Classroom)

In this two sections, writer combined about two articles which discuss about teaching pronunciation and speaking. In teaching pronunciation, writer discuss about the “PracTESOL: It’s Not What You Say, but How You Say It”, because writer think, that the aim of pronunciation is how we say the words it self. And in teaching speaking, writer discuss about the developing discussion skill in the ESL classroom, writer will share, how to develop discussion skill in ESL classroom, in order the discussion activities in speaking classroom, students more active and participate.

In teaching pronunciation, study how communicate effectively, to communicative effectively, language learners need to become proficient in using the semantic, syntactic, lexical, morphological and phonological elements of the language being learnt, those are the elements of teaching pronunciation. All ESL learners want to be understood by others about the pronunciation, but not all will want to sound like native speakers; psychosocial and individual factors will influence their attitudes and motivation to modify their accent. In pronunciation, not only what the word say, but also how the word say. In teaching pronunciation, there are several steps. First is setting the context, we are as the teacher are teaching a unit of work on personal identification. we have introduced the relevant lexical items and grammatical structures using your preferred methodology. Second, diagnosing learners’ spoken English the phonological features we focus on need to be related to the ‘problems’ the learners are encountering. By this way we can identify individual learner ‘problems’ and those common to the group. Third, selecting the content learning is enhanced when learners are involved in the decision making process and the content of courses is directly related to their immediate needs and context. For these reasons, I believe that it is prudent to not only diagnose the learners’ phonological problems, but also the communicative contexts in which they use English outside the classroom. Forth, incorporating phonology into esl lessons we’ve established that the majority of learners have problems with stress and rhythm and intonation patterns. They’ve indicated that banking is a topic they are interested in. we as a teacher select relevant material for the level you’re teaching.

In teaching speaking, writer will discuss about developing discussion skills in the ESL classroom. Discussion skills are often undeveloped in the EFL/ESL classroom. One of the reason is the learners difficult in speaking. As a result, many teachers never attempt discussions or, as a result of negative experiences, simply stop holding them. A solution adopted by many teachers involves the use of structured or guided discussions. These typically provide a framework within which learners are constrained to operate. Learners receive content input just before the discussion itself; they are then given roles to play, and follow predetermined steps through to the end of the discussion.

In implementing a classroom discussion, there are three stages. first, is pre-discussion, discussion, and last is post-discussion. in pre-discussion forming the groups. forming the groups is one of the stage in implementing a classroom discussion, because in discussion, need groups to discuss each other. in forming group, the teacher have to form from the students’ ability. Then after forming a group, identifying and organizing. The topic some learners find it difficult to generate and organize discussion topics in their first language. In the discussion, peer observation and evaluation. We decided to examine possible means of observing and evaluating the discussion. Peer evaluation may be carried out in one, two, or all of three main ways (the observer ring, shadowing and the reviewing of video- and audiotape recordings of discussions). The role of the teacher in the discussion stage is to pass unobtrusively from group to group, forestalling

possible breakdowns in communication caused by students having insufficient language to realize intended meanings. And in post-discussion, the main concern during this phase will be for learners to review and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the discussion with peers and the teacher, to make recommendations for future modifications and improvements.

REFERENCE : Richards, Renandya. 2002 Methodology in Langauge Teaching. Cambridge University Press.