How to Teach English Pronunciation

Video Transcript

"English pronunciation is really a complicated process because we have so many words that are spelled the same and yet sound differently. For instance, you might see the word heard and then see the word bread and think that it's going to sound the same and they sound entirely different. So, a lot of times what you can do to reinforce pronunciation skills is to do reader's theater, to do some musical instruction as they sing a songs, they remember the pronunciation. They must see the word as they hear it, however, because if you don't see the word and you only hear it, it is very confusing because we have two different kinds of vocabularies. We have a sight vocabulary which is this big and then we have a listening vocabulary which is, of course, quite large because we've heard so many more words than we've seen.And so, the pronunciation of those words relies a lot of times on what we have heard."