ESL Pronunciation and Song Improvement
ESL Pronunciation and Song Improvement
Written by Wendolyn Craun
Correct pronunciation is the bedrock of language. If you can’t say a word correctly, you have not truly mastered the language. How many of us have smiled when we hear a non-native English speaker speaking English because the pronunciation we hear feels so odd to our mind? Listen well and you know if the English speaker is from London, Texas, New York, New Delhi, or Beijing. This is mainly due to the issue of pronunciation. How you pronounce your vowels and consonants identifies where you learned a language.
What does song have to do with pronunciation? I studied classical voice for my undergraduate studies. In my training we needed to learn the IPA system, known as the International Phonetic Alphabet. By studying the IPA, whenever we would learn an Italian, German, or French song we would take the time to write the IPA of all the words for the purpose of achieving a correct pronunciation of the song. Because of this study, I learned how to create different sounds not included in my original soundscape as a native English speaker. For classical voice singers, the task of dissecting sounds for the purpose of correct pronunciation is a common task. As an ESL teacher, you may not be able to dissect English words of a text using the IPA system, but you can be intentional to consider ways to help students improve their English pronunciation.
Today I want to encourage teachers of English to consider the importance of using song to enable students to improve their pronunciation. Songs have limited vocabulary, thus it is possible to give focus to dissecting the sounds for all vocabulary words in a song. Rhythmic Patterns WAM English songs are a great tool for those who want to give students opportunity to mimic American English pronunciation. Students can listen to a song and hear the pronunciation provided. Teachers can then invite students to read the song text. Listening to a text read, the teacher can hear vocabulary words that are not pronounced the same as the pronunciation of text in the song. The next step is to have students sing. While students are singing, the teacher can hear mistakes. Those mistakes, once identified, can then be corrected. Thus, by teaching songs teachers can help students improve their pronunciation. As students learn additional songs, even more correct pronunciation skills will become a part of their language study.
Pronunciation improvement should be a goal of learners of all languages. If you learn a language and you do not have good pronunciation, many would say that you have not really learned the language. It is true that the primary goal of language learning is simply communication. That said, a high goal in language communication is to communicate in a way that others listening to you speaking will not realize that you are not a native speaker of that language. Teachers of language must, therefore, give continual focus to students’ pronunciation improvement. Rhythmic Patterns WAM English songs are one tool you can use to emphasize pronunciation in your English classroom.