Ancient and modern pronunciations - Курсовая работа

Mistakes are part of our life; we all make mistakes now and then. When students are corrected in front of their classmates, they feel offended and get discouraged. As such, teachers are expected to strive to find most creative ways to deal with this problem that most typically arises. They need to encourage and stimulate their students to participate in class without any fear of making mistakes. Most students refuse to answer to the teacher in the classroom on the ground that they are most likely to be the laughingstock of their class fellows.First, your students have already studied English for years and their pronunciation habits are not easy to change. A second problem for those of you who are native speakers of English is that you produce sounds so naturally that you may not be aware of how you do it, so even when you know that your students" pronunciation is wrong, you may not know what the problem is or how to correct it. Finally, the overwhelming majority of Amity teachers are not native speakers of the British "RP" accent ("Received Pronunciation", also known as "BBC English" or "the Queen"s English") which is the accepted English standard in Kazakhstan in most textbooks, including Junior and Senior English for Kazakh. The good news, however, is that through dint of hard effort it is possible for students to make some improvement in their pronunciation, particularly when they are attending to their pronunciation. (In other words, even future teachers with fairly heavy accents can learn to pronounce words accurately enough when paying attention that they provide an acceptable model for their own students.) If you pay attention to your own pronunciation, and spend a little time browsing through typical Kazakh English textbooks, you should also be able to learn enough about the mechanics of pronunciation to be able to help students.The early borrowings from Latin into various languages give some idea of the Roman pronunciation, for example Gothic "wins" meaning "wine" was borrowed from Latin "vinum"; this shows the-w-pronunciation of-v-in Latin clearly, at least at the time that the borrowing took place. In English speaking countries, two problems arise: First, are we to pronounce-v-as-w-is pronounced in English, or like English-v-? And then are we to say-ch-for Latin-c-, palatalizing the consonant before the fronted vowels, as in Italian, or pronounce it like English hard-k-? Teachers trained in the tradition of the Catholic Church will generally use the fricative-v-and the palatalized-ch-, others will use the other sounds, which the majority of modern scholars feels to be more authentic. If there is any overriding parameter of judgment, it should probably be on the side of convenience, but in the last analysis the student who is really concerned with the way Latin may have sounded, as a part of his esthetic appreciation of a poet like Vergil, must try to find out the best way, so far as he can determine it, and follow it.Unless you are fortunate enough to have very small classes, it will be difficult to give much individual attention to students" pronunciation. Students must therefore learn to rely on their ears to tell them whether their pronunciation approximates that of native speaker models. In fact, they have often been trained for years to immediately repeat whatever the teacher says, no matter how vague their impression is of the jumble of sounds they are trying to reproduce. Another problem is that while students are listening to the teacher"s spoken model, their attention is often focused more on preparing to repeat than on listening. The teacher"s sentence consequently serves less as a model for pronunciation than as a starting shot announcing that students should try to speak.Most native speakers of English have not formally studied the mechanics of English pronunciation, so this is an area in which it would be helpful to do some homework so that you are prepared to explain how sounds are made if called on to do so. However, you will almost certainly be expected to serve as a model for pronunciation, and for this purpose a limited amount of choral drill can be useful. Steps for such a drill would be as follows: 1) Choose a text that represents normal spoken English (as opposed to more bookish language). Have students listen to each sentence once or twice before attempting to repeat it. One fun way to practice the rhythm of English sentences is by taking a dialog from a book, preferably one with short sentences, and turning it into a "jazz chant." In essence, this means finding the natural rhythm of each sentence and then chanting it with emphasis on the key words, something like a group cheer at a football game or a chant at a protest rally ("Hell no, we won"t go" and so forth).Once students are able to repeat accurately after a spoken model, the next step is to have them

Contents

Introduction

1. The importance of teaching English pronunciation

1.1 Ancient and Modern Pronunciations

1.2 Listening and pronunciation

1.3 Modelling pronunciation

1.4 Performance of a text

1.5 Aspects of pronunciation

1.6 The Role of Teaching Pronunciation in FLT

2. Correcting learners’ pronunciation mistakes

2.1 New ways of correcting spoken errors

2.2 Correcting Without Hurting

2.3 Mistakes Made During Discussions and Activities

2.4 Problems of correcting students’ pronunciation

2.5 Exercises for the Pronunciation of Plurals for English second language

Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix