Glossary audiolingual teaching

Rhythm and phrasing
One advantage of a focus on stress is that it helps unite not just word pronunciation with sentence pronunciation, but intonation with rhythm and phrasing. It is often useful to start with work on phrasing rather than rhythm.
Good phrasing can be taught by drawing students’ attention to how words ‘go together in groups’ and the idea that pauses should be left between these groups to allow the listener to understand what is being said. It is usually necessary to go slowly here, explaining the meaning of ‘pause’, and giving experiences which help learners think about the whole communicative event from the perspective of the listener (there are some useful videos to help with this in Module 1 of the CD Learn to speak clearly in English). Once this groundwork is done, you have some useful shortcuts in your Metalinguistics communication repertoire.
It is not necessary to give strict rules for phrasing or pausing. There are usually several acceptable ways of phrasing a sentence or passage, and it is more important that the learner avoids incorrect ones than that they stick to one and only one correct one. This they can do naturally, if they have the basic concept that the listener needs the pauses to help understand the group of words that has just been said.
This approach to rhythm is particularly useful with the common problems of learners who speak painfully slowly or impossibly quickly: in both cases you can help the student by pointing out that it is not the absolute rate of speech that matters to the listener, but the sensitive use of phrases and pauses. This sensitivity can be developed through encouraging learners to think about their listeners’ needs when they speak.
Once the learners understand the value of phrasing and pausing, you can move on to some work on rhythm, explaining again that for English listeners, a steady ongoing rhythm is a great aid to comprehension.
In teaching rhythm, the communicative approach, as usual, puts considerable emphasis on the use of natural speech.
It is common for teachers to use exaggerated singsong rhythm to highlight the importance of regular stress and especially of so-called stress timing of English. This is often accompanied by finger tapping, clapping, or some other way of ‘keeping the rhythm’.
In fact, the rhythm of natural spoken English is not much like that of limericks or sonnets. Learners will quickly become aware of this, and it can then be quite difficult for them to transfer what they learn in class into what they need in real speech. Remember that although to a native English speaker the glide between the rhythm of a naturally spoken sentence, and the rhythm of a poem is easy and seamless, this depends on linguistic, literary and cultural conceptualization that may be quite alien to a learner. This is because many languages not only have a different natural rhythm to that of English, but have quite different cultural and literary traditions for poetry.
Although rhythm is very important to comprehension, it is not a strict rhythm like that of a poem. Rather in natural speech we are constantly updating or recalculating the rhythm. I believe the best way to teach rhythm is to play natural speech, help learners pick out the stressed syllables or words within it, and then let them repeat it closely in small chunks till they can say it fluently and naturally. The benefits of practice of just a few sentences like this will spill over into learners’ other speech.
Questions:
1. What is the essence of teaching pronunciation?
2. What can you say about the core of acquiring approximated pronunciation?
3. What are the main principles (criteria) of selecting phonetic/pronunciation minimum?
4. What elements does the content of teaching pronunciation include?