Video: Using music excerpts to illustrate connected speech

Introductory note: I am now back in the United States, but I am continuing to write a few blog posts reflecting on my experience teaching English pronunciation to Iraqi schoolteachers this summer. My thoughts are still with these strong and resilient teachers, as many of their hometowns continue to be featured on the news for turmoil and armed conflict.

Screen shot of video from http://www.luizotaviobarros.com

As I was preparing for a lesson on connected speech, I came across one of the best pronunciation teaching videos that I have found online. The video, by Luiz Otávio, consists of a series of five short clips from pop music videos, each one lasting for 30 seconds or less, with features of connected speech highlighted for each one. The video itself is hosted here, and you can also read the creator’s introduction to the video on his blog here.

There are several features that make this video excellent for classroom use:

1. It is efficient. The clips focus in on features of connected speech present in various songs, without taking up time with extended song lyrics that do not relate directly to the teaching point.
2. It is repetitive—in a good way. Because each song clip is played several times, students have several opportunities to notice phenomena, and they receive reinforcement. I especially like that the last repetition of each song clip is slowed down, which makes it easier to hear the linking.
3. It is inductive. Students hear the song clips before being told what points they illustrate. Information is also added gradually as the clip is repeated.
4. It adds value. Most pronunciation videos, at least on YouTube, feature and instructor telling viewers about a language point, followed by some examples. This may be interesting enough for an independent learner at home, but it adds little to a classroom environment. By contrast, Luiz Otávio’s video consists almost entirely of authentic listening samples, with or without commentary. This content cannot otherwise be replicated by the teacher, unlike a taped lecture.

One teaching tip I would add for using the video well is to pause it when each set of song lyrics first appear to highlight which segments they should focus on. In this way, students engage with a specific listening goal and have the opportunity to compare their predictions to authentic materials.

Screen shot of video from http://www.luizotaviobarros.com

My one critique of the video content is a repeated instruction not to pronounce the terminal ‘e’ in most English words before linking to the next word, as in ‘come on’ [kəm´ɒ:n]. While technically correct, this comment about final ‘e’ is a digression into phonics instruction that I find unhelpful. Because most students are accustomed to describing words in terms of letters rather than sounds, they generally are unaware of the number of consonant and vowel sounds in English, which I have experienced as a significant hurdle in getting students to differentiate among the 15-20 vowel sounds present in any given variety of English (thus, the need for tools such as the Color Vowel Chart to help with awareness raising). To keep the focus on pronunciation–as opposed to phonics–throughout the video, I would suggest that the teaching point for phrases such as the one above is that a final consonant links to the start of a following vowel-initial word inside the same thought group, with a reminder that spelling does not always tell us the final sound (or initial sound, e.g. ‘herb’ [ʔɜrb] in American English).

In any case, it is a great resource. Ever since I found this video, I have been thinking about what other song clips I could use to illustrate different aspects of pronunciation. This idea of using only small selections from songs to illustrate a single feature greatly widens the number of potential candidates, since most songs accurately illustrate some aspect of English pronunciation at some point, even if they don’t do so throughout (e.g. ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna: generally bad for sentence-level stress and intonation, but good in places, such as “If the hand is hard, together we’ll mend your heart”).

What are your favorite videos for teaching English pronunciation?

Vowel and consonant sounds across proficiency levels

After giving an overview of suprasegmental features of English pronunciation in class on Wednesday, I dedicated yesterday’s classes to discovery of English vowel and consonant sounds. I emphasize discovery because, despite all having a fair bit of formal knowledge of English, my students proved to have minimal awareness of English phonemes, as I had suspected.

The consonant sound discovery activity was fairly simple. I drew and posted a large picture of the places of articulation in the mouth, color-coding each place of articulation (lips, teeth, alveolar ridge, etc.). After eliciting (mostly in the case of my two higher-level classes) or presenting (especially in the lower-level classes) the English consonant sounds, I asked the students to identify in pairs where in the mouth each of the sounds was produced. They were given mirrors to aid in the task, which was helpful for sounds such as /f/ and /v/, where students could see their lower lip and upper teeth come together. I should note that the choice of elicitation vs. presentation of sounds was a decision I made based on time constraints. I do not doubt that the lower-level students could also have come up with them, given enough time. (Forty-five minutes goes by so fast!)

Even though I didn’t expect students to know the places of articulation by heart, I was surprised at how challenging it was for them across all four levels. On the other hand, I was rewarded with smiles of realization and accomplishment as we reviewed all the sounds produced at each point in the mouth and students tried them out in succession.

The vowel discovery activity required more adaptation for the different levels. In my master’s program, I was fortunate to be introduced to the Color Vowel Chart, developed by former professor Karen Taylor and her colleague Shirley Thompson. The authors helpfully provide a vowel discovery activity with downloadable sorting cards at their website, which I was able to use pretty much ‘as is’ with my two most advanced groups. I then followed up by having them compare the number of vowels we identified together in the Color Vowel Chart (15) with the British Council’s chart of vowel phonemes, which includes 19. At this point time was up, so the comparison served primarily as an awareness-raising tool.

Having had difficulty using the vowel discovery activity referenced above with lower-level students in the past, I opted for a more direct approach with my level 1 and 2 classes, while still wanting to keep an element of discovery. The solution: Break out the tongue depressors! I first elicited the vowel letters from the students and had them compare this number with the 15 on my Color Vowel Chart. With the tongue depressor resting on my mouth, I then asked them to watch the movement as I said the vowels from [i] down through [a], and again as I went from [a] through [u]. The point of the U-shaped progression in tongue placement was clear. We then all said the three vowels representing the extreme tongue positions ([i], [a], [u]) with our tongue depressors in position before trying to say all of the different vowels together, with and without tongue depressors. (Thanks to Robin Barr for introducing me to this visualization technique, originally with flat lollipops, which I have yet to find in the Middle East–so, tongue depressors it was.)

With these lower-level classes, I then gave the students the sorting cards with the task of matching like vowel sounds. However, I did not tell them how many groups of like sounds there would be. The level 2 students still had some difficulty with the task, so with the level 1 students, I further simplified the task by lining up the cards containing the color words (i.e. providing a model of the 15 sounds) and instructing the students to find words that rhymed with each of these. With this extra support, even my lowest-level students were able to practice identifying and matching vowel sounds in an engaging manner. The matching task would likely still be too difficult for absolute beginners, but I now feel that I have a useful tool for meaningfully referencing English vowel sounds even with high beginners.

Photo from http://flickr.com/eltpics, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/”

Adapting pronunciation lessons across proficiency levels

This week, I have begun teaching a month-long pronunciation class as part of an intensive English program for teachers at an English-medium primary and secondary school in northern Iraq. My teaching schedule lends itself particularly well to examining how to adapt a lesson for different proficiency levels, since I have four groups at four different levels for a 45-minute lesson each day. Virtually none of the students have had previous in-depth pronunciation instruction, so I am covering the basics of (standard American) English pronunciation with all of them. I am hoping that this learning-rich environment for me as a teacher will lead to a few blog posts over the course of the program. Here is a first installment.

To give some context to my lessons, my four groups of students roughly correspond to levels A1 through B2 of the CEFR in my estimation. (Their placement test only allowed for internal comparisons within the group.) However, on a listening proficiency test that I gave on the first day of class, none of the students, even in the highest level group, scored more than 60% correct on features relevant to pronunciation. Thus, the need for this class.

I am primarily drawing on two sources of materials: Targeting Pronunciation by Sue Miller and a set of tools introduced in the wonderful Teaching Pronunciation class at American University (in my case, under the instruction of Dr. Robin Barr and Shari Pattillo). Incorporating a variety of teaching tools will be especially important, since a secondary goal of the class is to model how the course participants can in turn teach English pronunciation to their own students. I am excited to have an opportunity to try out my techniques in such a focused way for the first time since getting my MA in 2010. More later!

Instructional materials on a shoestring

Students captivated by a movie of themselves, eltpics

Having spent the great majority of my teaching career working for resource-poor institutions, I have well-developed skills for finding instructional materials online. In fact, I have finally gotten around to bookmarking as many as I have a meaningful record of at my Diigo profile, though the tedious task of streamlining my tags remains. Using Diigo has already made it much easier to find materials I have used for courses in the past, but putting together a whole course’s worth of free materials is still extremely time-consuming.

That is why is was so excited when I came across the UK ESOL Core Curriculum while doing curriculum research for the adult English program I currently oversee (thanks to Beverley Timgren). What is so extraordinary about this resource, you might ask? In addition to a comprehensive curriculum outline for five levels of instruction (corresponding roughly to CEFR levels up to B2), all of this is available to download legally for absolutely free:

• Student books at 5 different levels (e.g. Level 1)
• Teacher guides for the student books (e.g. scroll down for Level 1)
• Audio tracks to accompany the student books
• Diagnostic tests, including audio
• Proficiency tests, including audio (scroll down to ‘initial assessment’)
• Teacher orientation materials
• Teacher training modules
• Student exemplars to use for teacher training

That’s basically everything that my program currently buys from a bookstore, plus tests and teacher training materials, which other teachers and I have been creating up until this point! The website is a bit clunky to navigate, though, so you can thank me for those nicely arranged links later.

Now, of course I need to look into the cost of printing student books before I conclude that these materials are going to save my program and my students a boatload of money. And there is some material that is less relevant to my students, since they are learning in an EFL rather than an ESL setting. But still! If I were back at the low-budget, high-ambition ESOL programs for adult immigrants in the United States where I used to work, I would be thanking my lucky stars and making plans for what to do with all that time saved on searching for free materials. As it is, I am working on downloading all of the materials to adapt where useful for my current students and to keep on file for the next time I have a group of eager students and no budget to speak of.

So, thanks to the UK government for investing in adult basic education and sharing the resources with us all.