Week 12 - METH - pronunciation reflection

I have to confess that I've let pronunciation slip quite a lot in the last few months, as Harmer says, putting very little focus on it and expecting the students to either notice differences or to naturally adapt their speaking skills over time. I've never really felt that pronunciation drills had any lasting affect, but then recently I've rarely used the mechanical techniques of explaining 'where' the sound is made.

In this section of the class video, I reacted to an unexpected problem with the word "Heroic" in the textbook headline "10 Heroic Lions and One Stupid Boy". I don't know if it was the headline font but she kept putting an L in there - He-Ro-Lic.

In the video, I did what I usually do and broke the word down into syllables. The intention was for her to stop thinking of it as one word, and sound it out slowly until she could speed up comfortably and achieve a good/good enough pronunciation. After a few tries, I added a 'w' into the pronunciation - "He-ro-wic" to try and smooth the transition between 'o' and 'i'.

It was not 100% successful, but having put nearly 2 minutes of the class into one student and one word, I felt that I couldn't really devote any more time to it. I would normally do drills with similar words, but for "heroic" I couldn't think of a similar enough word to compare and contrast with - with and "oi" in it.

My second strategy was also not 100% successful. Because she seemed to have gotten caught in a mis-pronunciation loop, but could say 'hero', my idea was to to get her to say "ic-he-ro" repeatedly with the view that she would actually be saying "ic-he-ro-ic-he-ro-ic" and actually pronouncing the full word. However, the student didn't seem to get this and stopped sounding each syllable, seemingly thinking we were doing some kind of tag-team pronunciation exercise.

On the positive side, there were some decent MIC techniques, and as her mispronunciation loop seemed to be getting too comfortable, I stopped her and 'reset' the pronunciation.

In hindsight, I feel like I should have taken a mechanical approach to explaining it, rather than repeatedly voicing the sounds that she clearly wasn't getting. By showing where and how the "oi" is produced, it could have saved her time and made the class flow. In a future class, I can do some drills where a phantom 'w' is inserted between vowels to ease the transition, for example "to another place" ("To Wa-nu-tha plais").