Glossary audiolingual teaching

Advantages and disadvantages of teaching beginners
Teaching beginners has some particular difficulties associated with it:
it is more difficult for teachers to communicate with beginners in English about pronunciation, due to their low English language skills
beginners often have limited opportunities to interact with native speakers outside class.
On the other hand, it has some important advantages, as we will discuss further when we deal with more advanced learners:
in classroom teaching, the group of learners is usually at roughly the same level (whereas more advanced learners can be very variable in the degree to which they have mastered pronunciation)
there is less ‘unlearning’ for them to do, both in terms of the way they pronounce English, and in terms of negative expectations about their inability to learn pronunciation
beginners are generally expecting, and expected, to have specific times devoted to pronunciation, which means that time can be scheduled for more intensive work to be done with them.
The ability to use what learners actually say, there and then, to create a mini-lesson on pronunciation in the midst of other work certainly requires a great deal of confidence and flexibility on the part of teachers, but is extremely effective – sometimes more so than spending a whole hour on pronunciation alone.
Starting with words and phrases
We have seen the importance of basing lessons around words, phrases and sentences, rather than phonemes.
In doing this it is particularly useful if material can be used that is closely relevant to learners’ own lives and concerns, so that they can practice words and sentences they will actually use in ‘real life’. This can be done either by asking learners to provide examples of sentences they would like to practice, or by simply observing the kinds of speech that they need to use in their everyday encounters.


12.2. Stress and intonation
It is very likely you will want to work on prosody with intermediate learners, since this is one of the most important aspects of English pronunciation, especially for students who have progressed beyond the level of words and short sentences, and need to produce more continuous discourse.
There are a number of ways of teaching prosody, and there are successful pronunciation curricula that focus mainly on intonation. However, the communicative approach favors teaching prosody through a focus on stress, rather than directly on intonation. This is not because intonation is considered unimportant, or even that it is considered less important than stress. It is due to considerations of Metalinguistics communication.
This does not preclude you from mentioning other aspects of speech if this seems relevant and helpful.
If you do this, try to test the effectiveness of what you do as objectively as possible in terms of real improvement in learners’ pronunciation, and try also to record your successes so that these can be generalized and extended.