Pronunciation Class: Using Tongue Twisters
Guest post by Alison Mullins
During your teaching career, there may come a time when your school hands you a pronunciation book and says, “Teach pronunciation.” In fact, this is rather likely. For your sanity, and the sanity of your ESL students, I recommend that you try to avoid teaching an 80–90-minute pronunciation lesson once a week for an entire semester.
When my school asked me to do that, I found a book with conversations and activities and used that to help build vocabulary (we also used those conversations to practice pronunciation) and to give us something more to talk about rather than just vowel and consonant sounds and the flow of speaking. For another level, I developed my own lesson plans to build vocabulary and discuss questions surrounding that vocabulary.
But the school most likely asked you to teach those students pronunciation because their English level is low enough to warrant the extra practice. One extra thing I started doing to help students to have fun practicing difficult sounds was to use tongue twisters.
Before I introduce the tongue twisters, I like to have all of the students record a random paragraph. I’m not sure if I would do this again because it’s difficult to monitor and most of the students don’t care about it too much.
If you’d like to try that, here’s what I did:
On the first day of regular class, I have the students read the paragraph and record their speaking. On the last day before the exam, I have them read the same paragraph again and listen to their original. Often, many of the students will have changed phones or lost the original. If you really want to keep track of their progress, you could collect them, but I chose to make it a personal learning goal. Some students seemed really interested in listening to both recordings and comparing them.
Next, I explained what tongue twisters are by trying to say part of a Chinese tongue twister: ba bai biao bing; ba bai biao bing ben bei po. Once they recognize it, they will smile and nod. I also explain the value of tongue twisters and how important it is to practice every day. I tell them that we will introduce a new one every week and also review the one from the week before so that I can see if they practiced it. After class, I make a recording and send the recording of the tongue twister to all the students (in a group chat is easiest) so that they have something to compare their tongue twister to.
How to teach and grade tongue twisters:
Some of the tongue twisters are simple, and the students enjoy saying them quickly. The more you teach them, the more that you will recognize the specific parts of the tongue twisters that you need to emphasize. Most students from the same culture will tend to struggle with similar parts of the tongue twister. Giving students a challenging tongue twister is great because it makes them work hard, but also try to mix in some easier ones so that they can feel like they are succeeding.
To see how well the students were doing, I included tongue twisters as part of the midterm and final exams. The first semester, I really wanted everyone to improve their “th” sound so I required everyone to say “He threw three free throws” for both exams. After an entire semester of reminding students to stick out their tongues, we were all ready to say goodbye to that tongue twister. But I really think it helped those students to improve. I had to remind them again and again and again, but I also saw a lot of great progress.
For the exams, I copied all of the tongue twisters into a word document and enlarged them so they were easy to read and then printed them off and cut them up so each tongue twister was on a separate slip of paper. Then I would randomly choose a tongue twister and require the students to say two different ones.
Besides being sick of “throwing three free throws” my students and I really enjoyed these tongue twisters and had a great time practicing some fun sounds. The longer tongue twisters were much harder, and even when I split them up into different sections, the students struggled with them. I would recommend sticking with the shorter ones unless a couple of students really want a challenge.
Hope you enjoy!