Hey everyone, today I would like to talk a little about pronunciation. I have a technique that I use every week with all my classes and have had great success.
First I assign them a level-appropriate text of 1-2mins in length. There are many great examples on coolenglish.net in the reading section or you can get small articles based on the students' interest. So if I have a group of business students I go to a financial news site like CNBC earnings or if they like entertainment news, you can go to a site like Entertainment Tonight. Really whatever subject they are interested in from videogames and movies to food and animals there will be articles about it. Try to vary the type of reading (news, reviews, advice columns, pieces of books, comics, etc) and only give them a small piece of the text, about 1-2 mins of reading time.
Second, I have them for homework record themselves reading the text and send me via WhatsApp or whatever messenger service you prefer. I listen to them with the text on my computer (I use OneNote) and I simply highlight in yellow all the words or phrases they mispronounce. In the next class, we go over those words and I ask them to rerecord just the yellow words as well as giving them a new text to record.
Third, if they make mistakes when recording the yellow highlighted words, I highlight them green and in the next class, we go over them plus the new yellow words from this week's text. I keep doing this until they get the words right, changing colors every time. This way they repeat problematic words, they have an easy list to review later and you create visible progress for your students.
Fourth, once a month I bring up an old highlighted text and ask them to say the words in class as a way to test them.
I always get a great response from this activity and hope you will too.
John
What a wonderful tip.
Thanks, John, I'll try this! Do you write the pronunciation anywhere so that they don´t forget, or just trust in the repetion of the recording? Also, are you using OneNote in "live time" where you're both logged on to it at the same time? I tried, but there was too much lag time between writing and seeing what the other person wrote. I still use it as a shared document for homework, though, and sometimes screen share it.