A difficult task is to help students improve their pronunciation not only of words but sentences as well. I’m not talking about accents but how intelligible the student is when speaking. Considering that all my students have smartphones and quite a few use iPhones, a simple activity that they could do by themselves over and over again is asking Siri questions.
Example: Can you tell me where the nearest bank is?
where can I find an Italian restaurant around here/ in this neighbourhood?
What English course do you recommend? ( many students will pronounce it as “curse”) getting hilarious results.
Eat / it – they’ll say: “I love skating – where can I do it?” They’ll say “eat” – and get tips on restaurants.
Chances are Siri won’t understand them at first and it will give crazy results or simply say I don’t understand.
So students will have to learn to enunciate well the words, intonation and not just isolated sounds. Some students resist this idea and won’t do it but those who are willing to give it a try will develop a much better speech, after the initial challenges and frustrations.
Cheers,
Mo
The Americanoid Blog 