(intro music)
- Hello TEFL students.
In this video, I want to give you four tips
for teaching consonant sounds.
Let's get started.
Tip number one, is to ensure that your students
are able to hear the sound.
So, as we talked about in another video,
perhaps you want to think about minimal pairs
and making sure those students can hear the difference,
for example, between \t\ and \d\ as in tide.
Um, once they've done that,
they could move on to other activities.
Tip number two, is to wanna create awareness
on the place and manner of articulation.
Now those are just the fancy terms that simply mean
to have your students pay attention to what is happening
with the parts of the mouth.
How is the air being manipulated inside
or coming out of the mouth?
So, for instance, you can ask your students,
where is your tongue?
Where are your lips?
If you're practicing sounds
such as \p\ or \b\ or \m\ or \w\,
all of those sounds have the lips coming together.
As students need to draw their attention to where those lips
are doing and what the tongue is doing.
For example, if you're teaching the sound \f\ or \v\,
here you have the top of the top teeth are coming down
and touching the bottom lip and your students must have that
position in order to create that sound.
Um, also, again, you want to think about
how that air is coming out.
Is it being completely stopped as in sounds such as
\p\, \b\, or \k\, \g\?
Here the sound is completely being blocked um, or stopped,
you can tell your students,
or is it slithering or maybe vibrating out like,
\f\ or \v\ or \s\ or \sh\,
and having them pay attention to the mouth
and how the air is coming out.
The ways that you can teach that are quite varied.
Um, I've sometimes drawn on the board,
how the mouth moves and where the tongue is at.
Um, other things we've done is use mirrors.
It can be kind of telling and fun to have your students
bring mirrors and have them pay attention to, for example,
if the tongue is out that they've actually got it out.
Um, other things is you can bring tissues
and have them hold the tissues and \p\ and \b\.
For example, one will move the air a lot
and one moves the tissue and the other one will not.
So they know the aspiration is correct.
I even have an app on my phone that has videos
of how the mouth works,
and it even has some fun little listening activities
for my students.
So those are some things to think about.
Tip number three, is you wanna teach them to understand
voiceless versus voiced consonant sounds.
And it's kind of fun to teach.
Basically voiced sounds are going to have a vibration.
So for instance, \v\, \g\, \b\,
all of those sounds that should make your voice,
your larynx vibrate, whereas voiceless have no vibration,
\f\, \c\, \p\.
Now you wanna make sure that they don't say the full word,
if you're practicing words,
because all of the vowels are gonna vibrate.
This is actually quite useful because if your students are
having troubles between, for example,
if they're saying wa\s\, instead of wa\z\,
you can have them hold their throat to see if it's vibrating
and they're making that sound appropriately.
So that's voiced versus voiceless,
and it actually is useful for
later pronunciation rules as well.
And my final tip,
I want to leave you with is the idea that
all good teaching needs to be done in context.
So pulling um, your students' attention
to this news of sounds in the context of example,
listening to a dialogue or practicing a speech um,
and trying to move towards recognizing how these
work in authentic language, um, should be your end goal.
(upbeat music)
Okay, thank you very much for listening.
I hope you've got something out of it.
(chuckling)
Okay?
Together
(foreign language) together.
- \g\
- [students] \g\
- \r\ - [students] \r\
- Good
(students continue sounding out \r\)
(all chuckling)
[all] \g\ \r\
\e\
\n\
- \n\
- [Instructor] (exhaling) green
- Green.
- (chuckling)
- One more.