Teaching pronunciation is an area of language teaching that many English teachers

avoid. While there are many textbooks and instruction manuals available, there is
comparatively little on learning pronunciation. Why? Is it because we don’t need to teach
pronunciation or because it cannot be taught?

The importance of teaching pronunciation

Indeed, we should teach pronunciation because words can have different meanings
depending on how you say them. For example, there is a big difference between a pear
and a bear, two sounds that are not easy for Spaniards! A teacher’s first goal for their
students is to achieve basic communication. However, that can fail if their accent is so
bad that no one can understand them. In addition, teaching pronunciation is necessary
since it’s embarrassing to ask someone to repeat themselves three times and still not
understand them.

This article is divided into:

 How NOT to teach pronunciation

 Teaching pronunciation with phonemes (but not necessarily phonetic
script)
 From the recognition of phonemes to practise
 Pronunciation of words
 Three barriers to good English pronunciation
How NOT to Teach Pronunciation
When teachers decide to focus on pronunciation practise, many of them make the
mistake of teaching pronunciation along with new vocabulary. This combination can
work with students who have a ‘good ear’ or speak a related language. However, it can
be hit and miss with students whose mother tongue has no relation to the target
language.

This problem brings us back to whether pronunciation can be taught effectively at all?
The answer is yes, of course, it can; it’s just that the way many textbooks teach it is one
of the least effective. Many books will have you drill pronunciation with repetition of the
vocabulary. Some of the better ones will have you work on spelling., Spelling is an
important skill, especially in English with its many irregularities and exceptions. But,
unfortunately, very few will start you and your students where you need to, at the
phoneme level.

Start with Phonemes (but not necessarily phonetic script)

The dictionary defines ‘phoneme’ as ‘any perceptually distinct units of sound in a
specified language that distinguish one word from another. Examples are p, b, d, and t in
the English words pad, pat, bad, and bat.’ This definition highlights one reason language
teachers start teaching pronunciation with phonemes. If a phoneme is a ‘perceptually
distinct unit of sound,’ students first need to hear and recognise it. Thus in the first
pronunciation exercises, students should listen and identify rather than speak.

Introduce your phonemes in contrasting pairs like /t/ and /d/. Repeat the phonemes in
words and isolation and ask the students to identify them. In addition, you may want to
draw pronunciation diagrams for each sound showing the placement of the tongue and
lips. Diagrams can help students visualize the differences they are attempting to
recognise.

Phonetic symbols
You might also consider teaching your students symbols from the phonetic
alphabet. Learning some of these symbols can clear confusion where the same letters
have different sounds. For example, the ‘th’ in ‘there’ and the ‘th’ in ‘thanks’ look the
same, but they are not. Of course, knowing phonetic symbols isn’t essential and would
be overkill with children. That said, it would be worth it for visual or analytical learners.

You can play all sorts of matching games with this material to make the drills more fun
and less stressful. For example, you can have students play with nonsense sounds and
focus on the tiny differences between contrasted phonemic pairs, the key being to get
them to hear the phoneme.

From Recognition of Phonemes to Practise

All these games for teaching pronunciation are included in my classroom activities for
teens and adults, in download and paperback. And this is the best book for ESL Online
teachers.

Once they can hear and identify a phoneme, it’s time to practice accurate sound
production. For this, pronunciation diagrams are helpful. Your students need to see
where to put their lips and tongues in relation to their teeth. Most sounds are articulated
inside your mouth, so students have no idea what you are doing to produce that
particular noise. If you have ever tried to teach a Japanese student how to say an
American /r/, then you have experienced the student’s frustration of trying to produce
tongue movements they can’t see.
Get hold of a reference book with diagrams. Alternatively, you can probably sketch them
yourself with a bit of practise. Your students will thank you for this insight.

New neural pathways

While this may sound time-consuming and unnatural, you have to realize that you are in
the process of reprogramming your students’ brains, and it is going to take a while. Our
brains must create neural pathways to learn new facial movements and link them with
meaning.

We are recreating an accelerated version of the infant’s language learning experience in

the classroom. We are also breaking down language to babbling noises so that our
students can play with the sounds, as infants do. So, students learn to distinguish
meaningful sounds while using more mature analytical skills that an infant doesn’t have.

Your students’ articulation and perception of phonemes will improve if you practise
phonemes regularly. Then, after several weeks, you will get them all to the point where
you can practice pronunciation on a word or even a sentential level.

This English Language Games book has pronunciation games for children. However, if

you teach online, these ESL Online Games are the ones you need.

Pronunciation of Words
Younger students may progress faster, but even adults will begin to give up fossilized
pronunciation errors with practise! So now it’s time to take the next leap and correct
pronunciation in the context of natural conversation. Now that we have looked at
physical challenges making sounds, we can address three further potential barriers.

When teaching phonemes, students explore physical parameters and develop

neurological pathways. To be explicit, students make meaningless noises and use their
mouths, tongues, and lips in new ways. But when we work on pronunciation at a lexical
or sentential level, students may have complex emotional, psychological, and cultural
motivations that require re-education.

Three Barriers to Good English Pronunciation

Three barriers to students’ adopting a second language are anxiety, learned
helplessness, and cultural identity. Of course, not every student will have all these
problems. However, for sure, all of them will have at least one to a greater or lesser
extent. As English teachers, we have to bring these problems to our students’ attention
in non-threatening ways and suggest tools and strategies for dealing with them.

Barrier 1 Anxiety 
Anxiety is an obvious problem. Students who feel anxiety speaking are generally well
aware of it and know it impedes their progress. Consequently, they might be unwilling to
experiment with sounds, lack the fluency to blend sounds correctly, and have poor
intonation and syllable stress. The best remedy for anxiety is structured, low-pressure
practise. In other words – games.

Jazz chants, handclap rhymes, reader’s theatre, and textbook dialogues are all helpful.
Structure and repetition reduce the pressure and allow students to focus on
pronunciation and intonation. Classroom rituals, like starting the lesson with a set
greeting and reading a letter aloud, are excellent ways to integrate pronunciation into
classes in a reassuring way. Drilling set phrases for correct pronunciation will eventually
improve overall pronunciation.

Barrier 2 Learned helplessness

Learned helplessness is harder to solve and recognize. ‘Learned helplessness means
that, after trying something several times and consistently failing to get a positive result,
a person shuts down. So, if students get negative feedback on their pronunciation skills,
and if they try to improve but feel they haven’t, they stop trying. You might think they are
lazy, but they don’t believe they can improve. They have already given up.

Luckily, the fix is straightforward: stay positive and praise frequently. To encourage
students, periodically record them to hear the improvement after a few months. If a
student progresses, tell them what they did right. For example, ‘the difference between
your short /a/ and short /e/was apparent that time! So let’s do it again!’ Record students
reading or reciting a text at the beginning of the year and again every couple of months.
Play the recordings and let students hear how much they have improved. They will
probably impress themselves, and you!

Barrier 3 Cultural identity

Finally, let’s look at cultural identity. Students who don’t want to be assimilated into an
English-speaking society won’t give up what makes them different. An accent is a clear
indication of one’s roots and history, and some people may be unwilling to abandon it.
However, this should not be a problem: As teachers, we should ensure that others
understand our students, but we don’t have to strive for hypothetical perfect
pronunciation. Instead, we should highlight that accents don’t matter much after a
certain point.

Use a mirror to practise pronunciation and see what you are doing with your lips, teeth and
tongue
Fun pronunciation activities
Here are three fun activities to help your students become more sensitive to accents;
listening to native regional accents, teaching you a phrase in their language and
impersonations.

Impersonations
Impersonations can be a class activity. For example, students can impersonate famous
people, wether fictional or newsworthy. The idea is to have them take on a whole
different identity and try out the pronunciation that goes with it. Often, your students will
produce the best English pronunciation of their lives when impersonating someone else.
Be sure to record them since it proves that they can use an English accent in a
conversation or monologue.

Loosen a student’s grip on accents is by having them teach you a phrase in their
language for you to repeat with your own accent. See if you can get students to imitate
you afterwards. Silly as it sounds, this will give them insight into key phonemes and how
one’s native language can interfere with the target language. Most of us have put on a
ridiculous, heavy French or Spanish accent at some point in our childhood as we spoke
English. It was usually to get a laugh out of the rest of the room. But, it is fun, and
students realize that if they can sound American/British/Australia/Canadian/ or
whatever in their language, they probably do it in English. Indeed, it can be fun listening
to a Japanese student imitating an American trying to speak Japanese, then watching
their amazement at their pronunciation in English has improved!

Listen to accents
Get tapes and videos of English from other parts of the world. Play or watch them, and
have the students pick a few sentences out for you to repeat. Let the students see if
they can hear the differences between your English and the English on the recording.
Then have them try repeating the phrases in your accent and the other accents. It’s fun,
gets people laughing, and helps students realize there are many correct ways to speak.

Teaching pronunciation can be fun, easy, and quite a learning experience for yourself
and your students. So take a few ideas from here, a few from your textbook, and give it
10-15 minutes every class. You will see quite a difference in pronunciation, attitude, and
overall language skills with time.

1: Teaching English pronunciation with phonics exercises:

Perhaps the most obvious and conventional method for teaching English pronunciation is
through phonics. Phonics focuses on learning the individual sound of a letter or set of
letters, vowels, and consonants when learning to read. One website has developed a useful
diagram for understanding the process of phonics in learning pronunciation: “letters form
sounds, sounds form words, words form sentences, sentences form stories, stories form
meaning, meaning forms reading.”  A new frontier for learning to pronounce words is
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through “visual phonics,” which teaches English pronunciation with animated texts, videos,
and songs. Visual phonics physically animates sounds and words to help ESL learners
internalize what they see and hear, distinguishing between different sounds, words, and
meanings. According to one source, “visual phonics shows various reading skills, such as
isolating sounds and syllables, segmentation, rhyming, and substitution, to help children
visualize relationships between letters and sounds, sounds and words, and words and
syllables.”  Visual phonics lends a fun and creative atmosphere for learning English
3

pronunciation. 
For older students, however, focusing on the pronunciation of keywords (content vs.
function words) in a sentence is of greater importance because distinguishing between the
two is critical for understanding the meaning of a sentence. Teach your older students to
stress content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) in a sentence as function words
(auxiliary verbs, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, and pronouns) are not stressed.
According to one source, “knowing the difference between content and function words can
help you in understanding, and, most importantly, in pronunciation skills.”  There are
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various pronunciation exercises you can do with your students that distinguish between
content vs. function words in a sentence. For my older students, I usually have them read a
sentence or ask them to make their own sentence stressing the appropriate words. For
example, I had one group of students practice saying this sentence: She’s going
to fly  to  England next week. I then encourage my students to act out the sentence by
pretending to fly, or I ask them where they want to fly. 
Teaching phonics to younger students should include pronunciation games (such as
clapping the hands when a student hears a specific sound or acting out a word or letter
sound), videos, and songs (perhaps singing a word or drawing out the sound of a letter)
that incorporate animations, graphics, and total physical response to sounds. FluentU has
an extensive list of ESL pronunciation games that involve movement, repetition,
interaction, and creativity.  Another useful phonics game is having the students create their
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own words from individual letters or groups of letters. For example, I use the annotate
feature of Zoom to write the sentence Mary sat on the fat rat. I may even draw a picture or
have a ready illustration to show the students. Then I may take the word “rat” and ask the
students what other words rhyme with rat or end or begin with “at” such as bat or cat. For
the younger students, I may take a single letter, such as “r” from rat, and ask them what
other words begin with, end with or contain the letter “r” such as rope, rain, or rabbit.
Another curriculum, Jolly Phonics, draws heavily on TPR by using actions (with the
hands) that are associated with the 42 letter sounds. These actions help younger students
remember how to produce the appropriate sound and then associate specific words with
sounds.  There are numerous pronunciation exercises and teaching methods for phonics,
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but I have outlined the simpler techniques. 

2: Use the different mouth positions to master English pronunciation:

Voicing should be an active process in your student’s learning to pronounce words
correctly. It is important for non-native speakers to master the different vowel phonemes in
English as they may not be present in your student’s primary language. One teacher notes,
“1.) Show them what they need to do with their mouth to make the sound, 2.) Create/give
drills for them to build muscle memory, and 3.) Give feedback throughout the
process.”  For your older students, it may be helpful to show illustrations or to demonstrate
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with your mouth where to properly place the tongue and lips to create a specific sound.
One source suggests, “have students use a mirror to see their mouth, lips, and tongue while
they imitate you.”  You need to ensure that your students know the difference between
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voiced and voiceless consonants. The voiced sounds (which include vowels and diphthongs)
should produce a vibration in the throat whereas the voiceless sounds will not. You should
encourage them to touch their throats to ensure that vibration occurs only with the voiced
sounds. A potential game to help master this skill is to have students compare voiced and
voiceless consonants such as ‘z’ and’s’ by repeating both and then creating sentences or
words with the letters. You can even encourage them to act out the sentence, or you can
provide illustrations or props modeling the sentence or sounds: ex. I went to
the zoo and  saw a zebra and a  snake. You may find it helpful to teach the phonemic chart to
your older students or those students who can understand it.  One website advises, “instead
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of spelling new vocabulary out on the white board, try using phonetic symbols (ex. seat
would be written /si:t/) to represent the sounds (rather than the alphabet to represent the
spelling).”  Aspiration is another pronunciation technique which involves a puff of air
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occurring with such sounds as /p/, /t/, /k/, and /ch/ (which are most commonly aspirated at
the beginning of a word). Encourage your students to hold a tissue in front of their mouth
to see it move when the puff of air is produced from a word containing an aspirated
sound.  Tongue twisters or alliterations are excellent for mimicking and memorizing the
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pronunciation of aspirated sounds: ex. Petey the peacock baked a pepper pie, or Two tigers
are taking the train. An excellent book that includes engaging and colorful alliterations and
tongue twisters is Animalia by Graeme Base, a book I was positively fascinated with during
my childhood. Tongue twisters help non-native speakers distinguish between similar
sounds such as “pen” and “pin” or “pan” and help them understand how to use the
muscles in their mouth to create specific sounds and pronunciations. 

3: Teaching methods for intonation, syllable stress, and vowel length:

I have already touched on which words to stress in the discussion of content vs. function
words (ex. Leon has lived in Spain for six months). Intonation indicates the way in which
our voices rise or fall when speaking certain phrases or sentences to evoke a certain
emotion or meaning. For example, when you ask the question “Did you eat breakfast this
morning?” your voice should rise when you ask a yes or no question or when you are
showing disbelief (He didn’t go to school today? Really?)  Your voice should fall with
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regular statements or questions that expect more than a one-word answer. 

Syllable stress requires special attention. Specific activities and pronunciation exercises
should be developed for mastering syllable stress. You should begin by teaching your
students how to count the number of syllables in a word by clapping them out or singing
along as each syllable is counted out. Another method is placing your hand under your
chin, repeating the word, and taking note of how many times your chin touches your hand.
This indicates the number of syllables in a word. There is a website called “How Many
Syllables” that allows you to type in a word and see how many syllables there are if you
struggle with counting syllables yourself.  For your younger students, if you want to
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incorporate TPR, you can have your students act out the syllables with hand actions, call
on them to hold up the correct amount of syllables on their fingers or ask them to represent
the number of syllables with toys, pencils, stickers or other objects. You can teach vowel
length with the same methods such as clapping hands to count out the length of a vowel or
singing out the full length of a vowel. Teaching your students vowel songs are an excellent
tool for learning to pronounce a vowel with the correct length.  You can even try creating
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your own vowel songs and syllable songs using pictures, videos, props, and dance
movements that the students can associate with the sound. The important thing to
remember is to teach with creativity, engagement, and repetition so that your students
exercise their mouth muscles and memorize the sounds. 

4: Teach students to pronounce words by cross-referencing minimal

pairs:
Minimal pairs are useful for distinguishing between the sounds of two similar words that
have different spellings. One source notes, “words such as ‘bit/bat’ that differ by only one
sound…can be used to illustrate voicing (‘curl/girl’) or commonly confused sounds
(‘play/pray’).”  Once again, tongue twisters or alliterations are excellent and fun activities
15

for distinguishing between similar sounds. For your Chinese students, it will be most
helpful to find tongue twisters with the minimal pairs “w” and “v” or “l” and “r” such as
“Red lorry, yellow lorry” and “wild vines make fine vintage wines.” Another complicated
activity would be to try and have your students sing a tongue twister or try and repeat the
tongue twister together without falling out of sync. There are numerous websites with a
comprehensive list of minimal pairs.   16

5: Use pronunciation exercises and teaching methods that address

connected speech:
I will make this topic quite brief. Connected speech refers to how words run together in
conversational English that often confuses non-native speakers. For example: ‘wanna’
instead of ‘want to’ or ‘gonna’ instead of ‘going to.’ For a non-native speaker, this can
sound quite confusing because there are no pauses, and the words run together, which
confuses the meaning. If you are able to do so, you should teach your students how to hear
and recognize connected speech. For example, linking is a common form of connected
speech where the end of one word melds into another such as “cats or dogs” which becomes
“Catserdogs?”  Other forms of connection speech include intrusion, elision, assimilation,
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and geminates.  Being able to recognize the way connected speech sounds and being able to
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reproduce connected speech will help your students speak more fluently and feel more
confident about their English speaking skills. Hold up flash cards with the different forms
of connected speech and have students form sentences, answer questions, or talk using
connected speech. 

Final thoughts for ESL teachers

English is a challenging language with many rules. Sometimes it is easy to get lost in all the
rules governing pronunciation. The most important thing to remember is to ensure that
your students feel confident in their English skills and to teach pronunciation using fun,
creative, and engaging material and activities. I struggle with pronunciation myself,
especially counting syllables and keeping track of stressed and unstressed words. There are
endless resources; thankfully, that can help you improve your student’s ability to
pronounce different words and create sounds. Other techniques to reinforce pronunciation
are drilling games, listen and repeat, isolating sounds, and word games. You will be
surprised at how much your own pronunciation of words and sounds and understanding
their meaning will improve as you teach your students using these five methods.

How to teach pronunciation – 5 tips for ESL teachers.

Of the hundreds of thousands of English classes that have taken place all over the world today,
only a tiny fraction of them will have contained any pronunciation training. The reason for this is
not that students do not want to learn pronunciation – they do. The problem is that general
English (ESL) teachers are not trained in teaching pronunciation (it is not covered on most
CELTA or TEFL teacher training courses), which is a shame as the topic is challenging and
rewarding for teacher and student alike.

Here I have prepared some tips for ESL teachers to incorporate pronunciation into the classroom.

1. Drill, drill, drill.

Students love being drilled – it is fun, energetic and really useful. There are three basic drills:

 Group: everyone repeats together.

 Individual / Scatter: teacher randomly chooses people to repeat.
 Individual / Order: teacher goes round the group in one direction (EG left to right)

Note that students often feel that they are not drilled enough, whilst teachers often feel they are
drilling too much . So drill, drill, drill – students love it more than you realise. Also note that it is
absolutely essential that the group repeat together and that all the group do it – otherwise the drill
will fall apart.

2. The Big 3s for Consonants, Vowels, Stress & Intonation

The four key topics in pronunciation (consonants, vowels, stress, intonation) can be taught
through a simple three fork approach as follows:

o CONSONANT SOUNDS – Place, Type, Voicing (a bi-labial, voiceless, plosive is /p/).

o VOWEL SOUNDS – Jaw, Lips, Tongue (an open, spread, front vowel is /æ/)
o STRESS – pitch, volume, length (a stressed syllable is higher, louder and longer)
o INTONATION – fall, fall-rise, rise

From a teaching perspective these explanations are invaluable as they give a nice simple
structure to a topic that can be very confusing.

3. IPA is your friend

Most students find IPA a wonderful tool for improving their pronunciation and most can learn it
very quickly provided it is presented logically. If the teacher starts with the whole chart it can
seem overwhelming, so a nice way to order it is as follows:

VOWELS – Schwa – Long Vowels – Short Vowels – Diphthong Vowels

CONSONANTS – Fricative Consonants – Plosive Consonants – Approximant Consonants – Nasal Consonants

Once students know the IPA system, you can have endless fun with games, crosswords and
transcriptions which are challenging, interesting and highly rewarding classroom activities.

4. Learn your stuff

There is no getting away from the fact that English pronunciation is a huge topic, so in order to
teach it well and to be able to answer questions that arise in class, it really pays to know the topic
well. An excellent book that makes the whole topic very accessible and enjoyable is Roach’s
‘English Phonetics & Phonology’. A more advanced read would be Gimson’s ‘Pronunciation of
English’.

5. Think (and teach) in connected speech

A lot of teachers when they first start teaching pronunciation, start to think in separate syllables,
explaining that the word ‘about’ would be pronounced ‘æ’ then ‘baʊt’ therefore ignoring the
weak form /ə/ at the beginning. This is not helpful for students who need to speak and hear the
language in connected speech. Teach joining and weak/strong structures so that students start to
experience English as a native speaker does. The best place to start is always with the schwa /ə/
sound within words and sentences.

These then, are the basics – any English teacher with teaching levels from pre-intermediate
upwards can add a bit of pronunciation to spice up their classes and give students something they
really want.