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Using speech pathology skills to improve English pronunciation

April 18, 2012 by Roxi

One of our teachers, Adina, describes how she uses the skills from her Master of Speech Language Pathology to help her students improve their pronunciation.

I have been teaching ESL at Greenwich since 2009. In 2010, I started a 2 year Master of Speech Language Pathology at Sydney University, which I recently finished. Speech pathologists (also called 'speech therapists') work with adults and children who have difficulty speaking for different reasons. For example, people who stutter (like the King in the movie The King's Speech), children who have trouble learning their first language, adults who have had a stroke and 'forget' how to speak, and people who have trouble pronouncing sounds. As you can imagine, there are many skills from the degree which I use when I teach English. Ion particular, I use these skills during the weekly pronunciation classes.

As a final activity to finish my degree, I did an individual pronunciation class with an Upper-Intermediate student, Jaime (from Peru) and filmed it! We worked on the sounds /dʒ/ (like in the name 'Jack') and /j/ (like in the animal 'yak'). The /dʒ/ sound can be quite hard for some Spanish speakers as it's not used in Spanish. We did activities such as practicing basic syllables (e.g. /dʒa/, /ju/, /dʒo/), and reading minimal pair words (e.g. "jam, yam", "juice, use", "J, yay").

I showed Jaime a computer program that I can use to 'look' at speech. This program, Praat, records your speech and turns it into a image which looks different for every sound you make. As you can see below, the image on the left (/dʒ/) looks different from the image for /j/ - it's darker (the part circled in red). Jaime used the program to 'see' if he said the syllables and words correctly. 'Seeing' and hearing speech can help students become more accurate in learning new sounds.

At the end of the 1 hour lesson, Jaime was much better at correctly using the /dʒ/ and /j/ sounds. It takes a lot of practice to use the sounds correctly in everyday speaking situations, but using them correctly in words is a great start!

Adina

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