Teach English in Laindon - TEFL Courses

Pronunciation Problems in china While the majority of people in china use the Mandarin language in school, business, and other public venues, many throughout china also use a home dialect when conversing with individuals from their shared home region. Such a linguistic predicament leads the chinese people away from standardized form of pronunciation in their national tongue, Mandarin, and instead toward multi-accented versions of the same. The major distinguishing accents in china are Northern and Southern, but even within these there remain multiple degrees of variation. Because students from all over china will attend a single university, pronunciation classes for foreigners are all the more difficult to organize. Thus a foreigner english teacher must begin his course by first establishing the students pronunciation difficulties. In small classes, this could be done one-on-one through 2-minute interviews, during which the students reads aloud a list of words representing sounds from the IPA. In larger classes, choral practice in groups separated by region might be employed. Once the teacher has gauged the students' individuals pronunciation problems, she can then focus on the major pitfalls through focused work and repetition. Examples of such pitfalls for chinese students include the following: both the hard and the soft “th” sound and confusion between both the “v” and the “w” sounds and the “r” and the “l” sounds. Methods for resolving these problem areas are described below. No matter the region in china, neither the hard nor the soft “th” sound are present in Mandarin pronunciation. Because students' trouble with these two “th” sounds is more physical than mental, one method of teaching these sounds is to get physical: have all students stick out their tongues as far as they will go, train them to first bite down on their tongues, and then blow air out between the top teeth and the tongue for the soft “th” sound, and adding a little voice for the hard “th” sound. While this exercise sounds extreme, it is a humorous time which the students enjoy and which trains them that proper english pronunciation might require physical adjustments. Another example would be the students' confusion between the “v” and the “w” sounds. It is a common scene to watch the befuddled movements of a student's mouth as he tries to properly pronounce such words as “view,” “weave,” or “with.” Because the chinese language lacks the “v” sound but contains the “f” sound, one method of rectifying this pronunciation difficulty is to train the students to first blow out the “f” sound, add voice, and then pronounce a word that begins with “v” (i.e. “fffffvvview”). Although Mandarin chinese does contain the “w” sound, confusion still sneaks into many students' pronunciation, strangely causing them use the “v” sound instead. One method for curtailing this difficulty is to take a common chinese word such as “hao” (good), and to train the student to attach the end of this word with the beginning of an english “w” word (i.e. “haowith”). Finally, while the students' confusion between the “r” and the “l” sounds has received the most international teasing, it is one that is also easily rectified. Like in the final example above (haowith), the connection of words in english is the best for training chinese students to properly pronounce these sounds. For example, while a word like “love” is often mispronounced as “rlrove,” a teacher can help a student to connect a word that ends in “l” with this word that begins with “l” (i.e. “falllllove”). Once they are able to connect the two, students can then begin pausing between the two words (“fallll lllove”) so that they can ultimately remove the first word and simply use the second (“llove”). While a foreign english teacher may easily recognize pronunciation difficulties in her chinese students, rectifying these difficulties takes practice and experience. Once he is able to quickly target and resolve common problem areas like the ones listed above, the teacher will then be able to spend more time focusing on individual problem areas in order to help his students use the most proper english pronunciation possible.