Page 202 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

Chapter 12: What Accent? Teaching Pronunciation
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Activities to help your students understand pro- nunciation, stress and intonation may include the following:
✓ Useamapoflocaltrainstationsandstreets to practise saying place names. You can swap the names for phonemes and see if students recognise them.
✓ Play a homophones games. Homophones are words which sound exactly the same but have different meanings, such as here
and hear. Say the word and see if students can come up with both spellings and mean- ings. You’ll be surprised to find that students often don’t know that certain words are supposed to sound the same.
✓ Have your students put on a mini-play. Drama is fun and encourages students to use good intonation.
✓ Play ‘I spy’ using phonemes instead of let- ters of the alphabet.
Activities to try
Imagine how this dialogue sounds in the following cases, especially the response ‘nice’:
✓ A mum is talking to her 14 year-old son who is a computer geek and heavy metal fan.
✓ An elderly man is talking to his wife who’s too ill to travel far.
✓ A woman is talking to a man who’s attracted to her. He had hoped to go
for a romantic stroll.
Other words that tend to need intonation to indicate the intention are okay,
oh and fine.
When students do listening exercises from a CD or other media they can then use the tape script to role-play the dialogue themselves, copying the intona- tion. They may need to go through it line by line, repeating after you or the CD, before trying it out. They can also play games where they each have a versatile word and a meaning or mood to convey. They can take it in turns saying their word while the class guesses the meaning or mood from a choice of options.
When you write utterances on the board, you can indicate the intonation pat- tern by using arrows, such as those in Figure 12-2.