Teaching Pronunciation - Using the Prosody Pyramid

A teacher can help overcome this psychological barrier and other challenges by thinking of the goal of pronunciation instruction not as helping students to sound like native speakers but as helping them to learn the core elements of spoken English so that they can be easily understood by others. In other words, teachers and students can overcome the frustrations, difficulties, and boredom often associated with pronunciation by focusing their attention on the development of pronunciation that is "listener friendly." After all, English pronunciation does not amount to mastery of a list of sounds or isolated words. Instead, it amounts to learning and practicing the specifically English way of making a speaker's thoughts easy to follow.

This booklet presents an approach to pronunciation that highlights the interrelatedness of various aspects of English speech. The approach addresses the individual elements of pronunciation but always within the framework of a larger system that uses all these individual elements to make speakers' ideas clear and understandable to their listeners.

A teacher can help overcome this psychological barrier and other challenges by thinking of the goal of pronunciation instruction not as helping students to sound like native speakers but as helping them to learn the core elements of spoken English so that they can be easily understood by others. In other words, teachers and students can overcome the frustrations, difficulties, and boredom often associated with pronunciation by focusing their attention on the development of pronunciation that is "listener friendly." After all, English pronunciation does not amount to mastery of a list of sounds or isolated words. Instead, it amounts to learning and practicing the specifically English way of making a speaker's thoughts easy to follow.

This booklet presents an approach to pronunciation that highlights the interrelatedness of various aspects of English speech. The approach addresses the individual elements of pronunciation but always within the framework of a larger system that uses all these individual elements to make speakers' ideas clear and understandable to their listeners.