PRONUNCIATION PAIRWORKS

What are pronunciation pairworks?
Pronunciation pairworks are information-gap communication activities for students to do in pairs or small groups. Success in each activity depends upon the students accuracy in producing and understanding the target pronunciation feature.

What are the benefits of doing these pairworks?
The pairworks can benefit learners by forcing them to focus on the accuracy of their production and understanding of hard-to-distinguish features of English pronunciation. Failure to produce or perceive the difference sufficiently will mean failure to complete the activity. A further benefit of the pairworks is that they show how the pronunciation feature in question is important to meaning and intelligibility - too often, students get the impression that pronunciation is merely about sounding good.

What aspects of pronunciation are covered?
The pairworks at the beginning of the book focus on individual sounds usually through minimal pairs. The minimal pairs are contextualized as names on maps, sentence pairs, picture descriptions or games. The pairworks later in the book focus on word stress, tonic stress and homophones.