Introducing
Voice-Setting Phonology by Sarn Rich
- lesson plan 1
Prelminary
information
Time:
1 hour
Level:
Intermediate
Main
Aims:
to explore suprasegmental approaches to improve English voice-setting,by
- raising awarenesS.
- noticing.
- imitating.
Subsidiary
Aims:
-
(depending on time) using English voice-setting to communicate
emotions.
- to improve recognition of ideas, emotions and relationships
conveyed by gesture, body language and voice-setting.
Timetable Fit:
This is an experimental lesson, which relies on the willing
co-operation and enthusiasm of the learners, as well as a
comfortable atmosphere so that the learners will feel relaxed
in each others' company doing things they might feel inhibited
trying in front of strangers. For these reasons it comes a
fair way into the course (lesson 18) when a good rapport has
been established.
Previous
lessons addressing phonology have looked at intonation and
expressive backchannelling in oral interaction, and weakening
and elision. Tomorrow we will look at rhythm, and in another
experimental lesson another teacher will introduce intonation
for proclaiming and referring.
This
is the first lesson to make use of video. Previous listening
lessons have encouraged the learners to deduce relationships
and feelings of speakers from their tone of voice.
Assumptions:
The learners are aware that we will be trying experimental
teaching approaches in this lesson.
Anticipated
problems & solutions:
The activities in this lesson are probably best introduced
one by one and spread over a course. Presenting them all together
might give the learners too much to take in.
I will maintain their enthusiasm and goodwill by presenting
each activity as an experiment, for the learners themselves
to evaluate.
Rationale:
In the past I have taught monolingual classes of speakers
of Arabic, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, Taiwanese/Mandarin,
Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Tibetan, Georgian, and
South American Spanish, but having only encountered a couple
of European Spanish-speaking learners (in multilingual classes
in Britain), the poor pronunciation of the learners in this
class took me by surprise. I can well believe Coe's claim
that 'European Spanish-speakers.. .probably find English pronunciation
harder than speakers of any other language' (in M. Swan (ed)
'Learner Training' CUP 1991:73).
The
learners have all put speaking, listening and pronunciation
at the tops of their lists of priorities for the course, and
so we have devoted several lessons to these already.
The
learners in this class are interested in the learning process
itself, and appear to have a good grasp of the rationale behind
typical classroom activities. This makes it a good class with
which to present and discuss experimental teaching approaches.
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