Pronunciation Lesson. Tricky Word Beginnings
Elementary to Pre-Intermediate (Ages 6-12) – Estimated Time: 1 hour – 1.5hours.
Target Learning:
This lesson plan can be modified to fit a variety of different levels and beginning sounds. To keep it simple, we have gone for some very low level sounds ‘P, Q, R’. As well as fine tuning these sounds, we will teach a variety of vocabulary beginning with those sounds (Pink, purple, penguin, pencil, red, ruler, robot, rabbit, queen, question, quiet).
If your students are more advanced, follow the same steps but with trickier sounds. For example you might want to work on difficult ‘s’ beginnings (Sp, Sh, Sl, Sw, Sm, St) as Vietnamese students often under pronounce the ‘s’.
Materials Required:
- Paper (1 for each student)
- Scissors
- Images (flashcards or digital) of your chosen vocabulary (as always, the more amusing/interesting the better!)
- Tape or tac to add pictures to the walls
Warm Up:
Alphabet Identification: Write the alphabet on the board, choose one student to identify the letter (or letters) that make up your chosen sounds. In this case P, Q, R. Get students to drill these sounds, paying close attention to the shape of your mouth as your make them. For example with ‘p’ we purse our lips inwards.
Main Content
- Test students current knowledge by asking them what words they know beginning with the sound. Guide them if needs be:
“What colour begins with ‘r’?”
“What colours begins with ‘p’?”
“Do any colours begin with ‘q’?”
“Do we know any other words beginning with those letters?”
Once they’ve shouted out some vocabulary, fine tune their pronunciation and focus on the beginning sound (your target learning). With young learners you can try and stop them from growing bored by moving on to repeat funny sounds: ‘puh, puh, puh, puh, puh, puh, puh, puh purple’. If they are having fun, keep it going by making your voice squeaky or very low as you do it.
- Add your own vocabulary. Take your images in a random order and show them to the students. Test to see if any of them know the words. If they don’t, teach them. After introducing the words, get students to guess which letter each one begins with.
- Now it’s time to reinforce the new vocabulary. Hand out the pieces of paper and get students to divide it into 6 equal sized sections (draw an example on the bored). In each of these sections the students will draw a picture. Introduce it as a speed-drawing competition. Give students 20 seconds (countdown out loud for more fun!) to draw one of the new pieces of vocabulary in one of the boxes, for example ‘Queen’. Do the exact same thing for the other vocabulary afterwards in the other boxes. ‘Queen, Quiet*, Robot, Rabbit, Pencil, Penguin’.
*For ‘quiet’ we had previously shown them an image of a smiley face with a finger to its lips.
- Get students to carefully cut out their drawings. Then select a winner for each piece of vocabulary. Take each of those positions and stick them to different parts of the classroom. Get students to stand up and command them to ‘run to penguin’ ‘run to rabbit’*. If you have big classes you will have to do this in groups. The first student to reach the correct picture is the new teacher and gets to command them to ‘run to pencil’.
* We used ‘run’ because it is another example of an ‘r’ word. But there are many other fun options depending on the vocab. If you are doing the letters ‘C’, ‘H’, ‘J’, ‘M’, ‘S’ ‘St’ or ‘Sk’ then change it to ‘crawl’, ‘hop’, ‘jump’, ‘march’, ‘skip’ or ‘stamp’.
- A fun way to finish the lesson is with a game of ‘Ping, Pang, Pong’. This is a great teaching aide derived from a Japanese drinking game (just don’t tell the parents). Sit students in a circle, with all of their cut-up drawings facing down in the middle. You start by saying ping, the student next to you says ‘pang’ and the student to his left says ‘pong’. The final ‘pong’ student must point across the circle to another student. The cycle then repeats with the student pointed at starting again at ‘ping’, the student to his left saying ‘pang’ etc. Once students understand the game. Add in the forfeit that when the students make a mistake they must turn over one of the pictures in the middle, say what it is and what letter it begins with. The best thing about this game is that as well as reading the vocabulary out loud, students also repeat the target sound again and again. Change it to whatever your target sounds are: e.g. Sting, Stang, Stong or Bing, Bang, Bong.
Written by Alex Sinclair Lack for Teacher’s Friend – Vietnam. All rights reserved.
