These days, the process of learning a new language is considered valuable, fun and engaging activity. Obviously, there is an evident positive interaction between the students and teachers brought out by constant trainings for the teachers.
On the other hand, students look forward to the activities during classes such as games, pronunciation practice sessions, quizzes and film showing. Sometimes students learn to speak the language by enhancing their pronunciation training every day. In that sense, pronunciation is very important in learning a new language.
Hence, talking about the five ways to help ESL students improve their pronunciation is beneficial.
For teachers, it is their responsibility to teach ESL students to have a good pronunciation of the English language. Without learning proper pronunciation, all the things that they have learned in the class will be put to waste. It will also affect their conversational skills.
Work on Intonation and Word Stress
First, the teacher must spend time listening to the conversations of the students and take notes of several factors such as word stress, question intonation and declarative sentence stress. Simply put, focus on teaching the students proper intonation and word stress.
Record the Students so they Hear Themselves
Second, tape the students in an individual manner to teach them proper pronunciation. Some teachers assign the students some topics for individual formal speech presentation and record the performance of each student. In this process, you will know the specific learning needs of each student such as poor pronunciation skills, wrong intonation and diction, improper use of stress and other elements of speech.
Speaking Interviews
The third way to help ESL students to improve their pronunciation is to conduct interviews. It should be an individual and continuous interview throughout the term. The students will be asked to answer informal questions, including their interests, hobbies, work experiences and academic progress and plans. Definitely, it is the perfect way to know them better.
Verbal Test
Lastly, don’t forget to schedule frequent quizzes for the students. To know the level of mastery of the students, short quizzes are necessary. It will also help the teacher know the weaknesses of the students in terms of pronunciation skills. From there, the instructor will devise plans to correct mistakes and improve the learning process.