Glossary audiolingual teaching

Sentence stress
Sentence stress and word stress are closely linked, in the sense that
they are both about one syllable being louder than others, and
they both depend on learners being able to hear and conceptualize that relative loudness before they can use it appropriately.
Sentence stress is quite different, though, in the role it plays in language:
word stress is fixed, as an essential part of the word it attaches to
sentence stress is variable, and controlled by the speaker as part of the meaning of the sentence. There are no hard and fast rules about sentence stress to match rules like ‘The word monsters stressed on the first syllable’.
Therefore, it is useful to teach sentence stress in terms of the important word(s) in a sentence receiving the stress, rather than in terms of words in particular grammatical categories (content words, for example) receiving the stress. It is true that the word ‘important’ is subjective, but stress is subjective – you stress the words you want your listener, on that occasion, to think are important in your message. For example, it is quite possible to stress a function word like ‘to’ if it is important on that occasion (e.g. ‘I’m going to the shops’).
Also, the concept of ‘importance’ is easy for learners to understand: they don’t have to think, ‘Is this word a content word or a function word?’; they just have to think, ‘Is this word important to my message.
Helping beginners with individual sounds
We have emphasized that it is not enough just to stay on the level of words and prosody with learners. We need to give them guidance with individual sounds as well. However, we have to be very careful in doing this, and sensitive to the needs of the learner in re-conceptualizing sounds in a way that is literally very foreign to them.
It is not enough to simply refer to letters or phonemes and expect learners to understand what we mean – at least not until we have helped them build up and grow confident with concepts of English phonology and spelling. How can we do this? Paradoxically it means putting much less focus than you probably do now on individual sounds, and instead focusing heavily on whole words. Individual sounds are pointed out within those whole words (see Section 2.4.6).
It also means spending much more time than you probably currently do on letting learners group (written) words together according to aspects of their pronunciation (e.g. First sound, long and short vowels, rhyming). When they do this you will see clearly any mistakes they make (e.g. Putting oven and onion with of and on), and can explain their mistakes in terms they will understand and you can test (e.g. ‘oven belongs with love not of).
Doing it this way is a hundred times more useful than simply giving learners the phoneme symbol for the vowel in oven – because it involves learners making a mistake and learning from it directly.
What if students consistently have trouble with the pronunciation of a certain sound or sounds? Of course you will want to help them with this, by drilling them on a set of words or contrasts that use the relevant sound. Again, though, this must be done in a way that enables learners to really benefit from it. Here are some key points.
Keep focusing on the problem sounds within whole words. You may need to isolate the sounds occasionally but keep this to a minimum and bring the focus back quickly to the useful words, phrases and sentences within which the problem sound occurred in the first place.
Keep articulatory explanations to a minimum (see box below); if learners pester you for information about what muscles to move inside their mouths, tell them Let your ears do the work!, and reassure them that your methods work well.
Never tell learners ‘you can’t make that sound’ especially not with an explanation that this is ‘because of the language you speak’, which will be immensely negative and discouraging to the learner.
Always listen to learners’ speech to see if you can find some word or phrase in which the sound is easier for them than in the phrase that is giving them problems now. There almost always is one, and you can build on this.
Using critical listening
Critical listening is an important part of the communicative approach. It involves learners’ listening to learners’ pronunciation, as opposed to native speakers’, and learning to judge whether the pronunciation is ‘acceptable’ (by whatever standards are appropriate in that particular class) or not.
It is ideal if learners can listen to recordings of their own voices, and especially if they can be recorded saying similar things several times, and then listen back to see if they can pick the versions that are correct or incorrect. If this is difficult to arrange, it is also very useful to play pre-recorded tapes of other non-native speakers and let your learners analyse their pronunciation. The CD Learn to speak clearly in English contains a whole module of critical listening exercises for students.
Critical listening is also very useful to teachers, in throwing into sharp relief the differences between learners’ conception of speech and their own. Use critical listening, and in fact all your interactions with learners, as an opportunity to learn about phonology and phonological concepts!
Make sure you are working on pronunciation
Pronunciation lessons should involve the learners spending most of their time speaking, or listening to the teacher speaking directly about their pronunciation. It is very common for teachers to think they are teaching pronunciation when in fact they are discussing spelling-to-sound rules, how to look up a dictionary, the rhythm of poems and limericks, or the rules of English phonology, such as stress shift rules. All these are valuable kinds of information to give learners, but they do not constitute a pronunciation lesson.