Glossary audiolingual teaching

Assessing learners’ pronunciation needs
In order to assess the needs of more advanced learners you have to engage them in a little general conversation. It is not enough just to look at their assessment scores, or to give them a word-based diagnostic test. Choose a simple conversation topic that will not overly stretch learners’ grammar and vocabulary, and try to make it as natural as possible. It is best if you can record this conversation on tape to do a fuller diagnostic analysis, and also to maintain a record of the student’s ability at the beginning of the class, but if this is too difficult to arrange, simply listen to the student while talking and make some notes immediately afterwards.
While you are engaging in the conversation, do not be too concerned with trying to diagnose the learner’s pronunciation problems in great detail (e.g. Deciding whether their main problems is linking, vowel length, or whatever). It is really too difficult to be objective enough to do this accurately while in the process of having a conversation. In fact, no phonetician would attempt to make a serious statement about an accent or voice pattern on one ‘live’ hearing; they would certainly make a recording and listen objectively.
A better strategy is simply to notice the effect the student’s speech has on you. Put yourself in the position of an ordinary native-speaker listener – someone with no special training or experience in listening to foreign accents, but with goodwill and an interest in understanding what is being said. Would such a person find the learner’s speech:
easy to understand, though with a noticeable foreign accent, and the occasional mispronounced word?
comprehensible, but only with some effort; a strain to listen to for more than a few minutes?
difficult to understand, requiring a lot of reliance on context and gesture?
Make sure that in diagnosing learners’ problems you are neither too hard nor too soft on them. Being too hard on them means picking up on a series of intermittent errors, or on a constant problem that is very noticeable but does not in fact impede communication too much. Being too soft is understanding them through already knowing what they mean, or through long experience of listening to learners. Try to put yourself in the position of say a bank teller or a neighbor or workmate – someone with good will but no special experience or knowledge. How would they cope with your learner’s speech?
Regardless of their level of grammar, vocabulary and literacy, we will label learners who fall into these categories as, respectively, ‘pronunciation advanced’, ‘pronunciation intermediate’ and ‘pronunciation elementary’.
You will need to work with learners on pronunciation with methods that are appropriate to their level. Let’s look in a bit more detail at exactly what it is that characterizes learners at these levels.