Monday, April 6, 2020

The "story" of pronunciation teaching: Engaging Preambles

One of the potential advantages of having taught pronunciation for a few years (in my case, almost 50) is that you have on hand a near endless supply of "success stories" from former students, no matter what you are teaching, ways to introduce and (hopefully) motivate yourself and students at the "drop of a hat."

Was reminded of that recently after viewing a plenary by one of the great storytellers in our field, Mario Rinvolucri. Although he does not talk about the use of stories as "preambles" in instruction per se in that talk or in this nice piece in TeachingEnglish.org,  I'm sure he'd concur with their value as such. Several other studies of storytelling in the field cover a wide range of classroom possibilities, but none that I have been able to find examine the "preamble" function.

My introduction to this function of storytelling was the work of Milton Erickson, back in the 1980s. (One of my all time favorite books on that was Erickson's classic "My voice will go with you." Here is an example of one of Erickson's stories done by Bill O'Hanlon (The audio of the originals with Erickson actually telling the stories is available but less accessible.)

I'll begin with one of my favorite personal "pronunciation preambles." Please add one of yours. Let's see where this story takes us!

Better pronunciation: over night!

Clker.com
I did a 1-hour workshop at a Korean University for about 400 undergraduates. The objective was to improve the rhythm of their spoken English . . .  overnight. All of them had conversations classes the next morning. (Important note: Only one of about 6 of the conversation teachers came to the workshop, although all were invited.) I trained the students to act like they were boxing when they spoke along first with easy dialogues on the screen and then, before we finished, with simple roleplays, in pairs. It got a little chaotic, as you can imagine, but they loved it! And just before I concluded the workshop, I gave them a "secret mission" . . . The next morning, in their speaking classes they were to use the same feeling in their upper bodies--without punching the air as boxing, as they were speaking in class WITHOUT LETTING ON TO THEIR TEACHERS THAT ANYTHING WAS DIFFERENT. I heard some amazing stories back. In the classes that pulled it off, the teachers were stunned by the difference in the rhythm and energy . . . and even playfulness evident in the speaking of the class.

Never fails. To see the basic technique, go here and check out the RFC demo.

Give us your best Pronunciation Preamble!


1 comment:

  1. Pronunciation Preambles are cool! I don't know much about haptics, but I used this strategy before with my Chinese ESL students who constantly struggled to pronounce their S's at the end of plural nouns or verbs. It was the Chinese New Year of the Snake, and I said "Remember, you are a snake this year, Rattle that S at the end of the word like you're a talking snake!" It really helped.

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