There are also poems, rhymes and chants to sat and some general guidelines how to practice them. You would probably not do them all in one lesson!
Say the poem yourself, and demonstrate the actions.
See if the children can guess what it means.
Practice saying it with all the class, keeping up a good rhythm and listening out for pronunciation problems.
Teach the children the actions and get them to do them as you say the poem. It is not important if they do not all say the words at this stage.
(Optional) Write all or some of the poem on the board and explain any difficult words, or even translate it if you think necessary.
(Optional) Ask the children to look at the words on the board again, and rub out one or two words (you could substitute pictures). Get them to recite the poem, ‘reading’ the invisible words.
Then rub out some more words and get them to recite it again. Go on like this until they are ‘’reading the invisible poem.
Activity 5
Work in groups of 3 and practice the chant, the action song and the rhyme.
Five little elephants (adapted from Of Frogs and Snails)
Words Actions
Five little elephants Five children stand in a row, using
Standing in a row their arms as ‘trunks’
Five little trunks
Waving hello The children wave hello with their trunks
‘Oh’ said an elephant
‘Time to go’
Four little elephants The first child looks at his or her watch,
Standing in a row. makes a surprised gesture, and hurries
Continue with: away
Four little elephants Three little elephants
Two little elephants
And so on until One little elephant
Standing in row
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Activity 6
At the end of the module read questions for discussion on the teaching pronunciation, discuss them in groups of 4.
Questions for discussion on the teaching of pronunciation
Does pronunciation need to be deliberately taught? Won’t it just be ‘picked up’? if it does need to be deliberately taught, then should this be in the shape of specific pronunciation exercises, or casually, in the course of other oral activities?
What accent of the target language should serve as a model? (For English, for example, should you use British? American? Other? Local accent?) Is it permissible to present mixed accents (e.g. a teacher who has a ‘mid-Atlantic’ i.e. a mixed British and American accent)?
Can/ Should the non-native teacher serve as a model for target language pronunciation?
What difference does the learner’s age making learning?
How important is it to teach intonation, rhythm and stress?
* Cambridge University Press 1996
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Activity 7
Read the text and fill in the gaps with the appropriate words from the list:
articulate, allophones, different, foreign, intonation, consonants, phonetics, prominence, phonology, pitch, received, syllables, spelling, stress, sound, vocal, vowels, voice, suprasegmentally.
…Most of us have an image of such a normal or standard English in pronunciation, and very commonly in Great Britain this is 1. “______________ Pronunciation”, often associated with the public schools, Oxford, and the BBC. Indeed, a pronunciation within this range has great prestige throughout the world, and for English taught as a 2._______________ language it is more usually the ideal than any other pronunciation…
…We make language manifest through pronunciation and 3._____________ that is t say, through spoken and written utterance.
…We filter out all kinds of phonetic differences and so perceive not the sounds as such but the phonemes they present. The same principle of selective attention applies to written language as well.
…The 4.________________ shapes that the sounds and letters take are perceived as tokens of the same type of form. With regard to speech, these variant tokens are called 5.______________________ of the same phoneme.
… The study of allophonic manifestations, how the sounds of speech are actually made, s the business of 6. __________________ . The study of phonemes and their relations in sound system is the business of 7._____________________.
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