English Pronunciation Practice. Brainstormings, Games, Activities, Warmers and Fillers to learn and practice English Pronunciation
English Pronunciation Practice
English Pronunciation Practice
English Pronunciation Practice with warmers and fillers designed to be short, designed to last no more than 10 minutes.
Here are 17 English Pronunciation Practice Activities:
Pronunciation ball throw
Write several phonemic sounds on the board, e.g. /z/, /s/, /ɪz/, /t/ etc. Students are divided into teams. One person from each team stands behind the line placed towards the back of the room. You (or another student) shouts out a word ending in one of the sounds on the board, e.g. plays, walks, horses, or watched and the students throw the ball at the correct phonemic sound. The first person to hit the correct sound gets a point for their team. Continue with a new set of students for each group.
Pronunciation grids
Put students into teams. Draw a 4 x 4 grid on the board, get on student from each teams to copy the grid and stay at the board (you will have several grids on the board, depending on the number of teams, so size them accordingly). Give the other students in the each team a grid completed with minimal pairs (each team has a different grid, or they’ll cheat!). The teams stand at the back of the classroom and must shout their words to their team-mate who writes the words in the grid on the board. The following restrictions apply:
Students cannot use the native language.
Students cannot spell the word.
Students cannon mime the word or point to it
The students cannot move any close to each other – they must stay at the board and the back of the class respectively.
An example grid:
Sheep or ship?
Divide the class into teams. Write two similar sounding words on the board (one on the left of the board, and one on the right), e.g. ship and sheep, number the words one and two. Say one of the words, e.g. sheep. The students must decide what word you said and then say either word one or word two. Use the ‘ship and sheep’ sheet (see the appendix) for a list of similarsounding words. To make this activity into a game, draw a start line and a finish line at either end of the class. Use the squares on the floor as stepping stones connecting the start and finish lines. Ask a player from each team to come forward to be the counter. If a team chooses the right word, their counter can move forward to be the counter. If a team chooses the wrong word, the counter moves back a square. The winner is the team who arrives at the finish line first.
Tongue twisters
Write or hand out some tongue twisters to the students. Practice saying them a few times and then have the student try saying them as fast as they can. You make it into a game or competition.
Here are some examples of tongue twisters:
Peter Piper: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers Peter piper picked. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick?
Woodchuck: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
Also Check out these Tongue Twisters! Click Here!
20 questions
Have a student think of a recent vocab word, e.g. an animal, place, etc. The other students then ask yes or no questions to find out clues about the word, e.g. ‘is it red?’, ‘can it fly?’ until they can guess what it is. The class tries to guess the word before they have asked 20 questions.
This can be played din small groups as well.
Banana-na
Put two students at the front of the classroom. One student is the asker and the other the answerer. The student asking the question can ask any questions he / she wants. The student answering the questions can only answer by saying ‘banana-na’. The student answering questions cannot pause, answer or laugh, or else they lose the point. If they can answer questions for 1 minute without breaking, they get a point; otherwise the asker gets a point. It gets funny when the questions start getting personal. This can be played in small groups as well.
Coffeepotting
This game should be modelled as a whole class but then can be played in small groups. One student sits at the front of the room as thinks of a verb e.g. ‘drink’. The other students ask questions to find out what the verb is but they cannot state the verb, instead the must insert ‘coffeepot’ e.g. ‘can you coffeepot with two people?’ or ‘do you coffeepot everyday?’. The student then answers appropriately. The answers can be more detailed than yes / no but should not give anymore than necessary away. The student that guesses the verb gets to the next coffeepotter.
Do you like your neighbours?
Ask students to arrange their chairs in a circle. Choose a student to stand in the middle. This student needs to sit down. He needs a student to free a seat so that he can occupy it. Explain that the student should point to a seated student and ask, ‘Do you like your neighbours?’ The seated student has two options:
Option one: Student says ‘no’ in which case the students sitting to her right and left (her ‘neighbours’) have to change seats.
Option two: Student says ‘Yes, but…I don’t like people who wear jeans.’ All students wearing jeans then have to change seats.
Different examples could be ‘Yes, but I don’t like people who wear leather shoes/watches/white socks/tights etc.’
In the scramble for seats which follows a ‘no’ or ‘yes, but…’ the student in the middle tries to find a seat leaving one of the other students without a seat.
English Pronunciation Practice
Fruits and vegetables
This is a great warmer for new classes or new teachers or just something silly at the start of class to get students talking. Ask the students to write down the following words on a piece of paper, keeping what they write a secret from those around them:
A fruit
A vegetable
A number between 1 and 200
A yes / no answer to the question ‘do you like football?’
How many pencils and pens they have
The first thing the do in the morning
Now tell them that these things are actually…
Their first name
Their family name
Their age
The answer to the questions ‘are you married?’
How many children they have
Their job
Now they must get up and go around the class and ask the personal questions and share information about their new selves. Encourage them to shake hands and make eye contact when meeting new people. You could do this exercise as a class survey so they have to write down the answer they hear.
Find someone who…
This is a good activity for a new class or to get students to practice asking questions. Have students brainstorm questions to ask each other, with help and error correction from you, or think of several questions for your students to ask each other and type them up on a handout.
For example: to the next person.
Don’t answer back!
The aim of this warmer is for each student to give the answer to the question asked to the previous student, sounds complicated but the students pick it up quickly. This warmer is a good listening activity and really makes the students concentrate on the questions. Before playing the game you will need to make a list of questions suitable for your students and their level.
Depending on class size you will need at least two questions for each student and it’s best if they progressively become more and more difficult.
For example:
Write the question What’s your name? on the board. Explain to the students that you are going to ask each student a question but they are going to answer the question from the student before. To help explain this, get a student to ask you a question e.g. have you got a dog? Don’t answer this question but tell them your name (answering the question written on the board).
Then ask another student to ask you a question, again don’t answer this question but tell them if you have got a dog (answering the previous question). Now start the game. Point to the question on the board and then ask the first student question number one. This student must give the answer to the question on the board. Then ask student number two the next question, they must give the answer to the question before. Don’t worry, they soon get the hang of it!
Continue asking questions making sure all students have a go. To make it more fun you can give each student three lives. If they hesitate for too long or they tell you the wrong answer they loose a life. The player or players with the most lives win.
For example:
Proxy interviews
Ask one student to become one of the others in the class. The rest of the class then interviews him. The ‘real’ student then compares the answers given by the ‘fake’ student. Switch up students. You can also put the students into small groups and do the same activity.
English Pronunciation Practice
Question dice
Designate different question words for each number on the dice, e.g. 1 – who, 2 – what, 3 –
where, 4 – when, 5 – why, 6 – how. Take a dice to class and divide your students into small groups. This can be done as a speaking race or a writing race with small white boards. Ask one student from any team to role the dice. What ever number the students land on, they must form a question using the questions word designated to that number e.g. 2 – what questions, students could write ‘what time do you get up in the morning?’. The first team to make a correct sentence gets a point. Continue by throwing the dice again for a new question word.
Quizzes
The possibilities for quizzes are extensive. Here are a few ideas:
Bring a quiz to ask. Read out the questions and students work in groups to decide the answer.
Hand out a quiz and students race to answer them all. Have students build their own quiz in groups based on a topic or vocab words.
Have students fill in and correct each others quizzes.
Use paper money, points or stickers for rewards to answering questions.
Shout the answer
Stand your students in two lines, one at one side of the room, the other line at the other side of the room. Give your students a set of topics or pieces of information they need to find out about their partner standing in the other line, e.g. birthday, full name, favourite food, etc. They must ask / shout to their partner the question they want to know. Their partner tells them by shouting the answer across the room. This can also be done for any kind of information gap fill. It works best when the pairs are students who don’t know each other as well (to avoid them already knowing the answers).
Stand in line
Ask all the students to stand up and form a large semi-circle at the front of the class. Then ask them to rearrange the semi circle as quickly as possible from left to right depending on their birthday, with the left end of the semi-circle representing January 1st and the right end of the semi-circle representing December 31st. You can then ask them to arrange themselves according the first letter of their names or in alphabetical order. They must ask each other question to do this. Repeat the exercise with other criteria, e.g. how many minutes it takes to get
to school, how many people are in their family, how long they have been studying at ILA, how long they spend on homework, how tall they are, or any comparative you can think of.
Who / What is it?
One student starts thinking of a well-known person or thing. He / She then says, ‘I’m thinking of someone / something that …’ and give a clue. The other students get to try to guess what it is.
If they can’t, the first student gives another clue. The student who guesses what is being thought of first gets to become the speaker.
Yes / No game
The aim of the game is to make your partner say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, while trying not to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ yourself. Demonstrate with a strong student first. If your partner says yes or no then you win a point. If you say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ your partner wins a point. You can make this more competitive by putting the class in two lines with one end for winners. When a student loses they must go to theother end while everyone else moves down one place. Set a five minute time limit. Set a five minute time limit.
English Pronunciation Practice
English Pronunciation Practice. Also check out these English games and activities
English Pronunciation Practice with warmers and fillers designed to be short, designed to last no more than 10 minutes.