Clearly Speaking by Joyce Mandell
Focusing on the First Day
As a pronunciation trainer/coach who teaches in many diverse academic and professional settings, I deal with a variety of learners who have different needs and goals for improving their speaking and pronunciation skills. My adult professional students want to have clearer spoken English so that they can move up in their careers, while my college freshman are often frightened to speak up in class for fear of not being understood by their professors and classmates. Regardless of the student’s level or the motivation for improvement, pronunciation classes are fraught with anxiety, especially on the first day.Whether they be college freshmen or bank managers, shame and nervousness about exposing their “poor pronunciation” in front of others is always a factor that influences the way I begin my classes. I’d like to share with you some of the ways we can lower the affective filter and gain the trust of students so that they can make the most progress in a nourishing environment.
On the first day of class, I usually have some interesting music playing (I favor Jobim’s Brazilian bossa nova for cheerful vibes in the classroom). As students file in and take their seats, I welcome them heartily (they always look very nervous; after all, they are going to have to expose to others what they often try to hide in their day-to-day lives). I have a questionnaire that they need to fill out, which tells me a bit about them (how long they’ve been here, work info, goals, etc.) And most importantly, I want to know if they are aware of some of their pronunciation issues and if they can pinpoint them in a rather specific way. The second thing I do is a warm-up exercise for the body and the articulators. This makes them more relaxed and receptive to the training, and I find it generates laughter and a good kind of “silliness” that is useful for establishing an upbeat environment.
Following the warm-up exercise is an ice-breaker, where I have students do interviews so I can hear them speaking in a natural setting. But I try to avoid the “boring” kind of interviews we have all seen before by borrowing an activity from Randy Cohen, who was the author of The Ethicist column in the New York Times. He had an interview show called “Person, Place and Thing” in which each notable guest chose one meaningful person, place or thing to talk about, the idea being that people would rather talk about something intimate and important to them as opposed to just talking about themselves. Depending on the number of students in the group, they can choose to talk about one example in each category or I can assign one group of three students, where each one gets one of the three categories to talk about. They sit up front as if they were on a TV program, while the rest of the class plays “audience” and can ask questions of the “guest”. It’s a great way to hear natural speech in the form of an entertaining exercise, and while this is happening I usually take notes about specific errors (compound noun errors, missing syllables, confusing rhythm in phrases, problematic vowels or consonants, etc.) I find that this kind of exercise really entertains the students and is useful in helping me to decide what specific features of American English Pronunciation I am going to focus on for the rest of the sessions.
Lowering the anxiety level of learners by establishing an upbeat, enjoyable environment from the very first day is extremely important to the success of any pronunciation training program. After all, we are asking learners to expose their errors and become comfortable with aiming for accuracy, rather than just communicative ability. Creating this ambiance from the first day is a sure way to help them achieve their desired goals.
Joyce Mandell has been teaching speech and pronunciation skills to non-native speakers for over 15 years, working in a variety of educational and business settings. She is an adjunct at Baruch College in both Continuing and Professional Studies and the Communication Studies Department, where she teaches public speaking. She also works individually with business professionals.
To contact Joyce about this column, send an email to dialogue@nystesol.org
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