Making Pronunciation Visual

This presentation was given by Thelma Marques and this is one are I wanted to know more about because generally my regular students don't have problems with pronunciation but my newer students do!

 First of all she pointed out that nearly half the letters on the phonemic chart are common alphabet letters and 25% of the chart is diphthongs which are combinations of symbols.

She talked about introducing new language by showing the phonetic words rather than the alphabet words to help to improve students pronunciation before they see the spelling.

I think that this is a really good idea, you could present this slide and ask students what they are, then ask them to match them to the symbols (assuming that they know the Zodiac system) and then finally the words maybe embedded in a text. (Just my thoughts at this point - don't know what Thelma was going to suggest.)

Thelma then showed us the following image to help with learning/teaching vowel sounds

She gave us a website for vocabulary which I had never seen before http://www.languageguide.org/english/vocabulary/ (This looks like a brilliant resource, thank you Thelma.) She told us that she would use the slides from the site in the classroom and ask the students to match the symbols to the picture. In this example she used a slide about body parts. She then used the idea of gapped lyrics with phonetic prompts which is a really good idea. I have used gapped lyrics many times in the classroom but never thought about this. She gapped body part  in lyrics from an Adele song.

Next she used a video clip from Friends and asked the sts to write down all the words with a particular sound in it. To focus the students on the sound. She also showed us how to make word stress visual (using dots) and used the same clip for students to find the sound(s).

Next we were shown a word cloud showing different words with the same spelling but different pronunciation so students could work on different sounds.

She suggested giving students simpler words grouped into the sounds phonetically and then ask the students to look up the words in a dictionary paying special attention to the phonetics, students could then ask them to add the words to the original groups. Again this is a nice activity especially if it is made into a race which would reduce the chance of the students becoming bored/distracted.

Next she showed us how she uses http://www.thisismarvelous.com/national-flags-made-from-each-countrys-traditional-foods/ to work with sounds.

Again all the language is presented without the students seeing a single word. Thelma is obviously a very creative lady! I would have loved to see some more of her activities.