TEFL Beachwood New Mexico

Pronunciation is one of the most delicate skills to teach and it is often not appreciated enough by teachers. It is true that many teachers may not feel confident since they are foreign and unable to produce the exact sound of each word whereas other teachers would say that they have not had enough training or knowledge to be able to communicate it to students. However, most degrees and tesol/tefl courses contain a module about pronunciation and phonology which covers all the basic points and also those not that basic of the english pronunciation system. Therefore, teachers should be already aware about how this system works but the facts do not really support this hypothesis. I remembered when I was at high school studying english as a second language; every year, as the english teacher change, the pronunciation of several words changed as well. E.g. the indeterminate article ‘a' was often pronounced as /ei/, other times as /ae/ other times as a spanish ‘a' and other times as /?/. Some other examples were the words flew or apple that used to pronounced them as /fle?/ and /eipol/ respectively. Due to these modifications in the pronunciation, each year I was more and more confused until I first travelled to the United Kingdom for studying english where I soon realized that I did not have a clue of how to pronounce a word as well as all that I knew was mainly wrong. As I got into the car, I did not know what to say, the only two things I could understand were what's your name and where are you from since the rest did not sound english to me, I was terribly frustrated. How it could be that I was not able to pronounce such simple and basic words as bag or egg that, in the other hand, I could perfectly understand when written. The answer was simple: I spoke english with spanish phonemes. Once in england, I started my english course at intermediate level, (thanks to my placement test it was only about grammar which I knew fairly well), every single day we had one hour of vocabulary and grammar, another hour of pronunciation skills, in which, the first day, the teacher told us that the number of different sounds of english was around 44, so clearly I had missed out more than 15. After a couple of days in the course I set my first target which was learning how to pronounce properly. This choice was due to the fact that if I am not able to pronounce properly I am not going to be able to identify words when spoken by somebody and therefore not able to answer nor develop a conversation. Consequently, if I knew how to develop a conversation, then my written skills would become much better due to the fluency and precision acquired from the words that you learn and deduce when you talk or hear someone else. Hence, the pronunciation was the key to decode the spoken language and code my own language to turn it into real english. By the end of the month I spent in england, all my skills highly improved and the following years I moved from intermediate to upper intermediate level and from upper-intermediate to advanced level. Considering this, where exactly is the problem for teaching pronunciation? What else teachers need to pronounce words appropriately or well enough in order to be able to teach confidently students? In my opinion, the answer is very clear. All english teachers must spend enough time abroad until they gain confidence enough to teach how to pronounce and warn students since the first day that pronunciation is actually the key for learning english.