Discuss The Importance Of Errors In Teaching Pronunciation

5. THREE “E” VARIABLES: EXPOSURE, EXERCISE AND EXPLANATION

The teacher´s goal in teaching pronunciation has to be intelligibility, and errors have to be treated in a constructive way and create strategies to overcome them. ”The more words a listener is able to identify accurately by a speaker, the more intelligible that speaker is” (Kenworthy, 1987:13).

Syllables, intonation and stress in English are crucial for effective pronunciation. Thus, it conveys word meaning, appropriate spelling, and speakers’ message/intention. ESL classes have to promote tasks that help learners increase their linguistic skills in English.

”There are two ways of dealing with this: The first one is to show students how sounds are made through demonstration, diagrams and explanation. But, we can also draw the sounds to their attention every time they appear on a tape or in our own conversation. In this way, we gradually train the students' ears. When they can hear correctly they are on the way to being able to speak correctly” (Harmer, 2007:185)

PROBLEM 1
There is more than one activity in which this problem can be addressed. As Underhill (1998) suggests teachers should give exposure by means of examples to the students to differentiate between sounds. Another way is to expose the students to native speakers and real English

Teachers must explain learners how to make intonation and stress patters. Teachers can discuss what stress is, introduce and explain stressed and unstressed syllables, give examples and write on the board them, do practices in pairs and make compare students´ markings. Some examples are: exercises in which learners mark the stressed words in sentences. The, they read aloud the sentence as a practice. Another technique is sound scripting. Students can use to improve their stress and intonation by means of content words using a word processor. For instance, teacher can use this