Session 2: Skills  Pronunciation These are my notes to remind you of the pronunciation ideas from the session: 1. Teach the sounds Students will learn better and faster in their language lessons if their learning begins with a ‘phonics’ programme to teach them the essential sounds in the language. This can be done in 1 lesson in Spanish and German but might be better done in several main sessions in French. However, the principle is simple; teach the students the main letter and letter-string combinations that produce different sounds in the TL from those they do in English – you are teaching them the key differences essentially. The method for teaching them how the language sounds is a VAK method, harnessing the power of the image, the sound and a gesture to represent a word that contains the key sound all at once. Once taught and practised, students are ready to put their skills into practice immediately and can begin to read texts out loud with accurate pronunciation. This is both incredibly motivating as well as having proven gains in terms of comprehension. There are materials on your CD for teaching the sounds in French, German and Spanish but do feel free to make your own too. 2. Make the sounds part of every lesson Once students know how to pronounce the written word, there is no need to employ a teaching methodology that always presents the word orally first with a picture. It is quite possible (and actually very benefitical) to present the written words alongside the visual image. Also, it is helpful for starter activities to present students with opportunities to read new texts and pronounce them accurately. These could be cartoon strips, short articles from the news, tongue twisters, song lyrics, etc… 3. Listening activities – make the most of your text book Often the first few listenings from every new topic in a text book do not challenge pupils in terms of comprehension and it can feel like we are just doing them because they are there. Instead of missing them out, one way to heighten the cognitive challenge of these tasks is to ask students to predict the spellings of the words they hear as well as doing the ‘match up’ activity the text book suggests. 4. Reading comprehension Research has shown that the ability to pronounce the TL accurately has gains in terms of better levels of comprehension. Instead of the very limited range of tasks that we often find in text books for reading comprehension, it is worth taking a text (perhaps from a different course book, or old GCSE materials, or the internet) and setting a series of tasks aimed to develop students’ ability to infer meaning, make links and develop their confidence to understand material containing some unfamiliar language. See the example from this session on the PowerPoint – it can easily be adapted to any text and any language. 5. Using rhyme If students can pronounce the language accurately from written text, they are in an ideal position to engage in creative tasks where they produce poems, song lyrics with words that rhyme. If you have tried doing this with students who don’t have a good grasp of the sound-writing system, you’ll know how frustrating it can be for them. However, if they have developed the skills first, they can be given much more freedom to be creative on their own, which is highly motivating.