pronunciation

[Elena Nikolaenko]

Dear colleagues!

I absolutely agree with the opinions about teaching pronunciation.

I for one had a great teacher of phonetics and she made us feel what hard 
work it was, it made you sweat. We

- did many drills - sound, intonation patterns etc as for Russian speakers 
it's rather problematic to manage reduction, not to drawl words, to speak 
with the due speed of speech

- then we read carefully texts and short dialogues read by native speakers 
and learnt them by heart and were to pronounce them the way they were on 
the tape. The teacher was very hard on us with imitating all those rise-
falls, fall-rises etc, a slight slip of the tongue - no good mark, either 
you sound English or...

- on a more advanced level we listened to texts and marked the intonation 
with the teacher, then even a more difficult task - we chose texts to our 
liking, marked the intonation ourselves and practised sounds (to sound 
English) at home and then cited the texts in class as news readers on the 
radio or the like

- and of 'cos each lesson little tests on sounds, intonation patters and 
the like.


Even those with tin ears were to admit that they learnt successfully.

Listening to songs, watching films etc in English was even a thing which 
didn't need discussion - naturally everybody did it.

Sincerely,
Nikolaenko Elena
ass. prof.
English Philology Department
Faculty of Foreign Languages
Bryansk state university, Russia

E-mail:
nem at online.debryansk.ru
Tel.: (4832) 575350
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: (4832) 666779
http://www.bgunet.com/fakultet/inyaz/vvedenie.php


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