Pronunciation skills: Glossary, bibliography and activities
A section featuring articles, practical classroom activities, a glossary of terms and a comprehensive bibliography.
Pronunciation skills articles and lesson plans
Pronunciation skills: Syllabic l
This lesson practises the pronunciation of syllabic l. It occurs in many words with the spelling ‘consonant + le’, and also when the contraction ‘ll occurs after a consonant sound, as in that’ll do.
Pronunciation skills: Stress in compound nouns
This lesson focuses on stress patterns in compound nouns. Students form compounds to fit definitions then practise them by asking questions.
Pronunciation skills: Adverbs of frequency
Adverbs of frequency such as always and sometimes are a familiar teaching point. This lesson by Jonathan Marks practises some of these phrases with a particular focus on their stress patterns.
Pronunciation skills: Sound and spelling
This lesson plan by Jonathan Marks focuses on homographs and homophones, as well as other pairs of words whose pronunciation learners tend to find confusing.
Assimilation and elision
This comprehensive article by Jonathan Marks explains the most common types of assimilation and elision, gives examples, and considers the significance of these two processes for learners and teachers.
Can intonation be taught?
In this article from the archives of English Teaching professional magazine, Gerald Kelly discusses the issue of teaching intonation.
Pronunciation skills: Destruction as creativity
Jonathan Marks offers a set of pronunciation tasks, with notes for teachers, that focus on reading aloud and text chunking.
Pronunciation skills: Glossaries
Jonathan Marks offers a helpful short glossary of terminology for teaching pronunciation: homophones, rhotic and rhythm.
Pronunciation skills: How many syllables?
This lesson by Jonathan Marks focuses on plural nouns and 3rd person singular verbs which are spelt with the ending -es. It helps students to develop an awareness of when this ending represents an additional syllable (e.g. age / ages) and when it doesn't (e.g. behave / behaves).
Pronunciation skills: what is it called?
Focus on pronouncing stress patterns in compound nouns.
Pronunciation skills: Who does what?
Jonathan Marks offers a pronunciation activity, with a helpful key for teachers, that focuses on pronouncing stress in compound nouns.