Pronounciation Workshop with Cathy Varney

Tonight Cathy conducted an awesome Pronounciation Workshop with incredible creative ideas to help your ESL student with pronounciation. While I cannot possibly reproduce the class here, I could provide a bit of a recap.

• For those who attended, this is a good outline.
• For those who have not attended, this should give you an idea of what you could get from such a workshop, as perhaps you would wish to attend the next time Cathy presents this class - which I highly recommend for all ESL Tutors.

Techniques Discussed / Demomstrated
What is Prosody?  - rhythm of our speech - look this up using "Bing" and you will find dozens of ideas

How do we teach students to stress or emphasize the appropriate syllables and words in a sentence? Some techniques discussed and demonstrated were

• Counting the syllables in a word/sentence, tapping them out on a table
• Writing the word various ways using large and small letters, slashes to separate syllables
• Rubber Band technique - ex: stretch the rubber band for longer syllables
• "Orchestra Leader" - ex: using your hand movements to indicate the rise at the end of a sentence
• March around the room in tempo with the sentence
• Jazz Chants with clapping

Types of stress discussed:

• Tonic Stress - normal intonation of our speech
• Emphatic Stress - word(s) you want to emphasize
• Contrastive Stress - ex: Would you like Pepsi or Coke? .. or providing new information "I lost my red hat"

Elision - letters that blend to the next word
Example: "That is news to me" we would actually say "Thatis newstome" where letters like "m", "n", "t" at the end of a word are often spoken in a blended way with the next word in the sentence.

Pronouncing using a single basic sound for each vowel
Example: "a" would sound like "ah", "e" would sound like "eh", "i" would sound like "ee", etc
This was a thorough interesting topic that is most effective in the classroom. Basically you could use pairs of vowels to phonetically spell out pronounciation of words to give the student a good pronounciation foundation.

Pronouncing the Alphabet
When drawn on the board, listing the letters in colums, this provides a simple picture of how to pronounce them. If you haven't seen this, it's very amazing.

Recommended Books

• "Pronounciation Pairs"
• "Clear Speech" - this book has several levels

This inservice was presented by the New Mexico Coalition. Cathy Varney is certified trainer for the Coalition and Proliteracy.