FINAL REFLECTION ON TEACHING PHONETICS

Asya TOSUN / 478859

Reflection on Teaching Phonetics

     During my school years, my teachers always told me "Pronunciation is not important. Just focus on grammar, do not make any mistakes and learn English words as much as you can". I think, because I am a perfectionist, this thought never satisfied me and I made a huge effort to improve my pronunciation. In my first year as an English teacher, I was so nervous because my school hired me as a Fitzroy (a sound-based method) teacher. That means I had to teach the students phonetics that had not been taught to me for years! I had phonetics class when I was in University, but I studied German Language Teaching, so I learned everything in German. Even though I had tried to improve myself, how could I properly teach my students something in which I still had deficiencies? Thats why, when I saw this course, I got really excited. 

     Before I started this course, I had some preconceptions. In the past, one of my students realized that I'm Turkish because of my accent, and he never spoke to me in English again. That's why, for a long time, I thought I should have an American or English accent. Additionally, my pronunciation should have been good as well, because I think one of the biggest challenges for teachers is making pronunciation mistakes. When a teacher uses incorrect pronunciation, students learn it wrong, and it becomes very challenging to correct it later. But I realized that what really matters is not being an American or English accent, but being able to pronounce words correctly. This course become more interesting for me once I started thinking this way.

     Teaching the correct pronunciation to students is as important as pronouncing the words correctly as a teacher. However, especially for young learners, learning pronunciation can be challenging. Because of their low attention span and pronunciation problems even in their mother language, their pronunciation process in target language becomes challenging for them. These two reasons are also challenging for teachers. Other than that, regardless of age group, students who have a fear of making mistakes can also face challenges in developing their pronunciation. As a person who faced a lot of challenges about pronunciation in my own years of education, I used to sing my favorite songs out loud, watch English movies and TV shows to improve my pronunciation. These are the things that I have interest, that's why I try to choose topics based on my students' interests and prepare activities accordingly. For example; I choose a scene from my students' favorites -maybe a short dialog or  a popular line-, we watch it together and then I want them to portray it. The ones who make less pronunciation mistake wins. Of course, this is only one of my examples. I definitely believe that integrating things students like effects learning process positively.