Lesson overview

Doing a warmer activity

  6 minutes

Do a minimal pairs exercise with flashcards. Show words that have the same pronunciation with the exception of one phoneme and ask them to repeat the pair after you. Make sure that students can pronounce each word distinctly. Figure 7-1 shows an example using /k-t/ words, but you can also use words such as full, fall, fell, feel, fill, fool, foal and similar word groups or pairs. Make sure that students pay attention to and copy the mouth shape you make for each word, as well as the sound. In addition, give plenty of opportunity to repeat after you.

Introducing the voiced and unvoiced consonants

  10 minutes

Show students a copy of the phonemic chart and drill these phonemes.

Look up Underhill’s version of the phonemic chart – its layout is especially good for this activity See www.onestopenglish.com/skills/pronunciation/phonemic-chart-and-app/interactive-phonemic-chart/.

Write the phonemes on the board. Ask the class why /p/ and /b/ are together and why /f/ and /v/ are together, and so on. The answer is that you produce these pairs with the same mouth shape.

Students may not know the terminology (the phonemes on the left are unvoiced and the ones on the right voiced), but they may be able to point to the mouth and throat areas respectively. You can explain the distinction between the two groups by drawing a head and neck sideways on, and drawing arrows to the mouth and Adam’s apple. Repeat the pairs of phonemes again, pointing to the appropriate area on your own body as you say each one. Show that /p/ is from the mouth but /b/ is from the throat.

Ask students to repeat the phonemes again, this time holding their Adam’s apple area so they can feel the difference between voiced and unvoiced production of sound.

Students who are unable to distinguish between /p/ and /b/ can practise using the appropriate amount of force by holding a sheet of paper in front of their faces at forehead height. If they can say /p/ with enough force, the paper will move away from the face, but /b/ cannot produce the air needed to move the paper, no matter how hard they try.

Photographing phonemes

  10 minutes

Ask students to use their phone cameras and camcorders. They’re going to record themselves demonstrating the mouth positions for the pairs of voiced and unvoiced phonemes. They should look at you pronouncing the phoneme, try to do it the same way, and then record themselves, as I show in Figure 7-2.

The camcorder is more effective than the camera when the movement of the tongue is more important to the students’ pronunciation than the lips and teeth (as with /t/ and /d/).

Over a number of lessons you can get the students to record all the phonemes on their phones, or at least all the ones they have trouble with.

Teaching Tongue Twisters

  5 minutes

Give the students some practice pronouncing the phonemes they find tricky to pronounce. Start with minimal pairs.

This website helps you find minimal pairs for practically any two phonemes in English: myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/wordlist/minimal.html. The classic books Tree or Three? and Ship or Sheep? by Ann Baker (Cambridge University Press) do the same job and are usually lurking somewhere in your school resources cupboard (if you have one).

Isolate the minimal pairs that best suit your students’ pronunciation problems. For example, a number of my students from Colombia struggle with /v/ and pronounce /b/ instead. On the other hand, Korean students tend to confuse /p/ and /f/.

From a list of minimal pairs, create a tongue twister to help students see that in English you confuse words if you don’t make the distinction between two different sounds. Help them feel the physical difference between the pronunciation of each one.

Here’s an example tongue twister for /b/ and /v/:

• Brenda the vendor went biking with a Viking.
• But her ballet-loving valet said, ‘I vote for a boat’.
• When Brenda the vendor and the young biking Viking
• Saw cupboards quite covered with marbles, they marvelled.

And here’s an example for /p/ and /f/:

• The chief has a passion for cheap-looking fashion
• There’s far too much pressure to make him look fresher.
• So from packs of cool facts he just picks a quick fix.

It isn’t necessary to teach students the meanings of the words in a pronunciation exercise. They’ll look them up in a dictionary if they choose to.

Put the tongue twisters on the board for the students to note down. Read the tongue twisters to the class slowly and ask the students to repeat them line by line until they begin to distinguish the tricky phonemes more clearly.

  12 minutes

Next the students practise reading the tongue twisters aloud in pairs. When they feel confident, they record their own voices reading the tongue twisters on their phone voice recorders. They may also record a good example of pronunciation such as a classmate’s voice or yours. The students should play back the recording and re-record if they’re not content with the quality of their pronunciation.

I usually allow students to go out of the classroom to make their recordings, so that they can hear themselves clearly and feel less self- conscious speaking into the microphone.

Dictating to peers

  5 minutes

Prepare minimal pairs worksheets like the ones shown in Figure 7-3, but use phonemes suitable for your students’ needs. Each numbered section is a minimal pair, for example 1) Brenda and vendor and 2) biking and Viking. Swiftly drill all the words on the worksheet chorally and individually.

  8 minutes

Put students in pairs, perhaps of different nationalities, so that they can help each other with different problems. Give the pairs two identical worksheets. Get the pairs to sit back to back or with a book between them so they can’t see each other’s mouths. Each student must say one word in the minimal pair while his partner listens and circles the word he heard. Finally, the students compare their answers. This activity facilitates greater awareness of clear pronunciation on the part of the speaker and improved distinction of the sounds on the part of the listener.

Doing a cooler activity

  5 minutes

Show the students how to work on their pronunciation skills using their phones. Introduce them to free pronunciation applications such as Sounds - the pronunciation app by MacMillan (www.soundspronapp.com) or Pronunciation Power by ECLI (itunes.apple.com/us/app/pronunciation-power/id368753108).

Extension activities

Give each student a copy of the phonemic chart. Mouth a phoneme silently. Students watch and point to the phoneme(s) on the chart they think you said. Different answers are possible for the voiced and unvoiced pairs. After students get the hang of the game, they can play by themselves in small groups.

Ask the students to find four new words that begin with the phoneme they struggle to pronounce. They can do it as homework and explain the words to groups of classmates in the next lesson.

Challenge the students to learn and recite a short poem to practise clear pronunciation. Children’s poems like ‘Do Not Feed the Animals’ by Robert Hull and ‘Time’ by Valerie Bloom are manageable for low-level students.