In this blogpost i will write about pronunciation and whether or no I think
it is a difficult subject to teach and learn. Further on I will also discuss
what model of pronunciation I would use in my teaching of pronunciation.
In my opinion, whether or not
English pronunciation is difficult or not, depends on a lot of things. First
and foremost I believe that if your mother tongue has a lot more similarities
to the English language, you would more easily learn the correct pronunciation.
I.e. the Norwegian language has a lot of similarities with the English
language, but someone from Asia would have more difficulties because their
pronunciation is so different from the English. Another aspect that helps Norwegians is that
we watch all of our foreign movies with subtitles, so we get to hear the
English language a lot.
But I think that to learn English
you have to practice it, and so it is most important that the pupils talk
mostly English during the lessons at school. In my lessons I prefer to correct
the students pronunciation not by saying: “That is wrong. It is pronounced….”
By instead I just repeat the sentence that they said out loud. “Yes! It is snowing outside.” This way I hope to
not make the pupils afraid of talking English in the classroom. So in my
opinion teaching and learning English pronunciation is not very difficult, as
long as get to practice it as much as possible.
In my experience I don’t have a lot
of choice when deciding which model of pronunciation I can choose to teach my
pupils. This is because the school that I will be working in most certainly
will have chosen their English textbooks beforehand. Most of the textbooks used
in Norwegian schools, are based upon the British model of pronunciation. Because
of this I will be mostly trying to teach pronunciation by the British model.
But I feel it is important to make the pupils aware that there exist other
models of pronunciation when it comes to the English language. At the same
time, I think that the easiest way for the pupils to learn pronunciation is to
have consistency. I think that exposing the pupils to a lot of different models
of pronunciation, at least in the beginning of their learning experience, could
lead to a lot of confusion. But if could choose my own textbooks I would use
the American pronunciation model. This is the model that is most used in movies
and on TV, and the most pronunciation that the pupils are most used to hearing I
their daily lives.
Yes, I absolutely agree that learning correct pronunciation needs to be done by practicing sounds but under guidance from a teacher. It appears that the British-English-based audio materials that come with the textbooks are perhaps out-dated, given that most of you seem to think that American English is now being dominated in the media, which also influences the kind of spoken input Norwegian learners get outside the classroom. I wonder if this means that something needs to be done in the school system in terms of the selection of the textbooks or if teachers should have a freedom of using other resources for teaching American pronunciation. Perhaps ironic to have course materials based on British English, if not only teachers but also most of the pupils think they speak with American accent? Good point about introducing only one model of English to beginners to avoid confusion, but if a teacher speaks with an American accent while the teaching material is based on British, this may still confuse them, I think, which is an apparent dilemma. (By the way, some minor errors in a few sentences, e.g., missing a subject and perhaps spelling mistake for the preposition "in").
SvarSlett