I. Comprehension-based approaches:

a) Total Physical Response (TPR). (James Asher)The teacher gives commands for single actions and learners physically respond. TPR offers a route to the acquisition of comprehension skills which underlie the natural acquisition of communication skills;

b) The Natural approach. Learners of any age are able to take in speech input if most of it is comprehensible through pictures, actions. It respects the initial pre-production period, expecting speech to emerge not from artificial practice but from motivated language use. Attention is paid to interpersonal and personal negotiation. Fluency is often achieved at the cost of accuracy.

II. Production Based Learning.

Silent Way of Learning.(Galeb Gattegno) The main principle – teaching should be subordinated to learning. The teacher doesn’t speak much, his verbal input is restricted to minimum. Verbal output is elicited from the learners with the aid of “scatter charts” of words and affixes, rods. There is no praise or criticism, the teacher corrects and guides by means of gestures and silent lip movement. The atmosphere promotes cooperation and support.

III Humanistic and Phycho-suggestive approaches:

a) Community Language Learning (Curran) stresses the importance of treating the learners as individual human beings and requires the teacher to be a sympathetic counselor, guide, friend rather than an authority and instructor. It places emphasis on the learners’ personal feelings and their reactions to language learning. Learners say something they want to talk about, in their native language, the teacher translates learners’ sentences into the foreign language, and the learner then repeats the phrase to other members of the group.

b) Suggestopedia was developed by Lozanov. It makes use of dialogues, situations, music, visuals, images and relaxation exercises to make learning more comfortable and effective and to make maximum use of the brain’s capacity to combine the conscious and the unconscious for learning. All these promote learning superconductivity, a perfect state of learning receptiveness enabling learners to process massive input into intake with no forgetting. This method was used for developing intensive learning methods by Kitaygorodskaya and others.

Lecture 3 Teaching Pronunciation

1. Pronunciation skills and importance of their development

2. Methodological classification of sounds and ways of introducing new sounds

3. Stages of teaching pronunciation and a set of activities

4. Teaching techniques of reading

1. Pronunciation skills and importance of their development

The importance of teaching pronunciation depends on two main reasons:

1) to help the students understand the spoken English they hear;

2) to help make their own speech more comprehensible and meaningful to others.

Phonetics in our schools is taught according to the principle of approximation. It means that phonetic material is limited (e.g. not all intonation patterns are studied), certain decrease of accuracy of articulation is permitted (as long as articulation is clear and communication effect is achieved) and somewhat low tempo of speech may be allowed. Phonetic material is selected according to the principles of appropriacy to language norms, frequency of usage, and correspondence to the needs of communication. It is arranged in cycles and concentres, systematization and revision phases are preplanned. Thus, it is unnecessary to get learners acquainted with the notions of phonemes and allophones but they are to understand that long or short sounds can change the meaning of the word. Phonetic knowledge (rules) is needed only when they help learners master the pronunciation skills quicker.

The order of studying the selected material is defined by the objectives of teaching speaking, listening and reading. The work at pronunciation is also integrated with the work on grammar and vocabulary. For beginners phonetic material is introduced and practiced at every lesson. It starts with some phonetic drills, songs, poems, tongue-twisters. Besides phonetic training, they provide tuning the learners into English. For intermediate and advanced learners the work on pronunciation goes on but it focuses on preventing some phonetic mistakes and developing fluent pronunciation sub-skills.

Pronunciation sub-skills include automatic actions of sound production and sound reception.

Intonation sub-skills include automatic speech actions of producing and perceiving intonation patterns.

Aspects of pronunciation to focus on:

• individual sounds;

• word stress;

• sounds in the flow of speech;

• intonation, including rhythm and stress in utterances.

Sounds in the flow of connected speech can undergo some changes, weakened forms may appear (e.g. schwa), some sounds are not pronounced in the same way as in isolation, e.g. they may be assimilated, sometimes intrusive sounds can appear etc.