CLIL4U Pre-Course Unit 3 - Pronunciation

Pronunciation

CLIL teachers who are are not language specialists are sometimes unsure about the correctness of their pronunciation of the new language. There are several things you can do to build confidence.

• Practise the individual sounds of the language (‘the phonemes’), as well as the pronunciation of whole words.

• Good dictionaries and course books usually list phonemes in a phonetic chart. Once you know the symbols that are used to show sounds, you can look in a dictionary to see how to pronounce a word. Some online dictionaries allow you to hear the pronunciation.

• Findwebsites which give clear guidance on pronunciation ‘rules’, and/or on phonics, which is the link between spelling and pronunciation.

• Get an App which will allow you instant access to correct pronunciation, wherever you are.

• Record your pronunciation of individual words, and compare your output with standard pronunciation.

• Record some of the things that you want to tell your students. In this way, you can correct yourself if you get something wrong. This also results in a useful resource for your learners, as they can listen to the recording more than once if they need to.

• Train your students to keep a record of the pronunciation of a new word as well as of its spelling and itsdefinition. The most important thing to note is the stress pattern. Stressed syllables are slightly louder, longer and more high-pitched than unstressed syllables.
• For example, ‘definition’ has four syllables (de-fi-ni-tion) where the third syllable is stressed. Students can record it like this:ooOo.

(Dictionaries show syllable stress by a marker before the stressed syllable: /dɛfɪˈnɪʃən/).

One practical and helpful rule for pronunciation is that prefixes and suffixes are not stressed. In the first sentence of this text, we know that ‘specialist’ (Ooo) and ‘correctness’ (oOo) are nouns because of their suffixes. We also know that these syllables will be unstressed.

In a similar way, the suffixes which we use to make the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives are unstressed, for example new, newer (Oo), newest (Oo).

Below you can listen to the audio file of the text.

Click on the button below to return to the Unit and read the Language Focus.

After reading the Focus, you will be able to practise the language point by doing a series of exercises. 

This Unit forms part of a language course designedto help teachers refreshtheir English language skills.

It was developed as part of the EU Project ‘CLIL4U’, and is intended as preparation for the main CLIL4U course onTeaching through CLIL.

To follow the language course, click on the CLIL4U Pre-Course Homepage button below.