Since my college decided to go online, I have been reading heaps of articles and blog posts on how to adapt my face-to-face EFL lessons to working on Zoom. I’ve found great ideas and resources shared by colleagues from all over the world! I have been experimenting with Zoom and adding the interaction patterns on my lesson plan to make sure that they continue to be student-centred. I’m lucky enough to have access to the IWB files of the books I teach, which makes it super easy to keep my lesson plans as close to what they actually are when I teach face-to-face, which I originally thought was the best thing to do. However, as I was finishing up my lesson plan for this Monday, I came up with two very important questions that I think we should all be asking ourselves:
So I did a little bit of research and sat down to think about ideas to share with colleagues so we can all help each other get through this crisis and come out stronger, more knowledgeable, and better prepared for the future. I have decided to break it down into different sections, which coincide with the different stages in a pronunciation class, as described by Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin (2010): 1. Description and analysis 2. Listening and discrimination 3. Controlled practice 4. Guided practice 5. Communicative practice 1. Description and analysis In this first stage, it is important to introduce the articulatory features of/differences between the aspects being taught. Doing this face-2-face would appear to be the best way, as students can actually see you producing the sounds and they can copy your articulation, right? Now think about doing this online: students can still see you through the webcam, and even better, they get a close-up view of your mouth without you having to get uncomfortably close! When learning how to articulate sounds, seeing the teacher is essential, but seeing your own articulation is just as vital. With Zoom, students can activate their cameras and look at their own mouths while saying the target sound. This will allow them to compare and contrast their articulation with that of their teacher and help them develop self-monitoring skills. Another good thing about doing this online is that there’s great resources out there to enhance the learning experience, such as the University of IOWA’s website (https://uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/), where students can see and play with the articulation of all (American) English phonemes. Consider sharing your screen with students as you show them how the tip of the tongue touches the upper teeth to produce the English dental fricative sounds. These visual cues will help students compare and contrast these sounds to their L1 sounds in an easier and more amusing way. At this stage, you and your students can also do a bit of silent mouthing. You can read words without producing sound, just mouthing silently, and have students write in the chat what word they think it is. Students can also do this in main sessions or Breakout Rooms. If you’re working on suprasegmental features, such as stress patterns, rhythm, intonation, you can tap the rhythm on the table, wave your arms around, clap, or indicate these features with your fingers. Students can also guess what word/phrase you’re producing based on the stress pattern or intonation. 2. Listening and discrimination This stage could be pretty straightforward and as close to what a face-2-face listening and discrimination exercise would be like: you can use the whiteboard function in Zoom to write some minimal pairs and ask students to comment in the chat what word/sound they hear. The good news is, there are heaps of online resources to use for this purpose, which you can share through your own screen, or give students the links to work more autonomously in Breakout Rooms. It’s always important to check in on them if they are working in groups, as they may need some guidance. Here’s some links I have found with all kinds of minimal pairs (vowels, consonants, stress patterns, intonation patterns) https://www.speech-language-therapy.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13:contrasts&catid=9:resources&Itemid=117 http://www.manythings.org/pp/ 3. Controlled practice How do we drill? It might be a bit difficult to have all students repeat at the same time in a main session, I mean, you can of course unmute them all and try it out, but the truth is you’re not going to be able to hear mistakes, or even know who’s who. I don’t think drilling just for the sake of drilling is a good idea. If you cannot give them feedback on what they are saying, what’s the point of repeating? They will just fossilize mistakes! When students are working on listening and discrimination in their Breakout Rooms, join in and take this opportunity to do some drilling. Give students words, phrases or sentences with audio so they can listen and repeat. Ask them to listen to each other in pairs and give each other feedback. If you do this in smaller groups as they work with the links/activities you’ve provided them, you’ll get to hear them properly and give them good feedback. It’s also less daunting for students, as they might not like to be put on the spot in front of everyone else. 4. Guided practice There’s loads of games and activities online that make our lives so much easier. I have compiled some activities I personally liked, but I am sure there are many more out there if you just type in what sounds/patterns/features you want your students to practise. I have been thinking about the interaction patterns for this stage, and I have come to the conclusion that you can adapt any of these activities to whatever pattern you feel more comfortable with. You may want to divide students into Breakout Rooms and give them digital copies or links for them to work in groups. Make sure you check on them regularly to give them some feedback. Some of these activities you can do in a main session by sharing your screen and asking students to provide answers through the chat, but bear in mind that you will have to encourage students to do these activities aloud at home (they need to speak/listen to figure out the right answers!), but unfortunately they are going to have to be muted. You can also give these links and activities to students to work on individually as part of classwork or for homework even. Here’s a couple of examples for you:
Take a look at these mazes you can download online: mazes for word stress: https://www.englishclub.com/esl-worksheets/pronunciation/stress.htm mazes for segmental phonetics: http://hancockmcdonald.com/sites/hancockmcdonald.com/files/file-downloads/SoundNotSpelling_0.jpg http://hancockmcdonald.com/sites/hancockmcdonald.com/files/file-downloads/maze%20heat%20hit.jpg http://hancockmcdonald.com/sites/hancockmcdonald.com/files/file-downloads/Corner%20to%20Corner%20worksheet.pdf
Some examples for you to look at: https://7f5acaa2-276d-411c-bf6c-8d9b96b7783b.filesusr.com/ugd/271a60_65f1d7afa99d46db89231f86a3f97118.pdf https://7f5acaa2-276d-411c-bf6c-8d9b96b7783b.filesusr.com/ugd/271a60_db6f62e1b88045cdad1f460b8f88856d.pdf For more ideas and resources take a look at these links. Like I said, you can give these to students to practise individually, or you can project these on your screen and play together. http://www.englishmedialab.com/pronunciation/regular%20past%20pronunciation%20ending%20sounds.htm http://www.esltower.com/PRONUNCIATION/interactive/homonyms-pre-intermediate/index.html http://www.englishmedialab.com/pronunciation/odd%20sound%20out.htm http://www.englishmedialab.com/pronunciation.html http://www.manythings.org/pp/ http://www.eslstation.net/quia-pron-activities.htm http://www.cambridge.org/elt/resources/skills/interactive/pron_animations/index.htm Other common activities you do in the classroom can be done online, too. For example, you can open the chat and ask students to write as many words as they can think of with the vowel sound or stress pattern you have taught. You can turn this into a competition to make it more fun, and you can then use these words for syntagmatic or paradigmatic drills. You can also use them for your communicative practice activity. 5. Communicative practice Don’t forget to include this last step in your lesson. Students will never fully acquire the sounds of English if they don’t get the chance to practise them in a freer and more spontaneous way. Give them a communicative task to work on in pairs or groups and divide them into Breakout Rooms. Make sure the task you give them requires them to use the specific features you have worked on. For example, if you give them role-play cards, also give them words to use that contain the vowel contrasts you have worked on. You can turn any speaking activity into a pronunciation communicative practice activity if you just give them some words or phrases to use! Take a look at these role-plays a colleague and I have created to work on vowel contrasts: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MNYqLyb31RNb7aX98DU7_WOdh8PDD09q/view?usp=sharing You can also ask students to prepare individual presentations, record themselves (try http://soundcloud.com or http://voicethread.com) and then share their presentations on your virtual classroom, or your padlet wall (http://padlet.com). Once they have all uploaded their work, give them instructions to listen to each other, give feedback, make comments or ask questions. It’s always a good idea for students to record themselves when doing speaking activities. Now that we’re teaching online this has become so much easier! Let’s take advantage of this and encourage students to take ‘progress shots’ of their speaking. They will feel very proud in a couple of months or even years when they see how far they’ve come! I hope this has helped you come up with ideas of how to teach pronunciation in your online lessons. If you have tried other resources and tools, I would love to hear from you. I’m new to online teaching and I am still trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. For some reason, teaching skills and grammar seems a lot easier, and that is why part of me was afraid that moving online would inevitably mean less chances to work on pronunciation. For someone like me, who enjoys teaching and learning about Phonology, that’s a scary thought! Let’s take this opportunity to re-think the way we teach pronunciation in our classes, and come up with new ideas to enhance the experience. A big thanks to Marina Cantarutti for her contributions. She's been curating online content for several years now and it's come in handy!
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AuthorI'm Lucia Fraiese, an EFL teacher from Buenos Aires, Argentina, teaching English to international students in Perth, Western Australia. I have specialised in Phonetics and Phonology, and have taught General English, English Literature, English Phonetics, and Spanish as a Foreign Language. I'm also a Fulbright Alumnus. Take a look at the 'about' section for more information! Archives
March 2020
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