How to say it

It’s English conversation today… I volunteer to teach at a group to help people whose first language isn’t English, to improve their conversation. It is such fun and both the students and my fellow ‘teachers’ are lovely and it’s a really enjoyable morning, fuelled by Alex’s wonderful coffee!

Not all of the ‘teachers’ are actually people who have been in the profession, and not all of those who have been teachers have taught students who have a different first language. When I was teaching in mainstream education, English as a second or other language was my specialism. Even so, of all the areas of language teaching, pronunciation is to my mind the most tricky.

As a teacher you want your students to communicate, you want them to be confident, so it is tricky knowing when to stop them to say ‘f’ not ‘v’ or ‘s’ not ‘es’; because we are teaching adults, some of my fellow teachers think it is almost rude to interrupt, but then they struggle because they haven’t caught what the student is trying to tell them.

It’s about balance; I don’t stop someone when we are just chatting over coffee, but if we are ‘in class’ and I ask them a question and they mispronounce something, I gently let them know, and maybe spend a minute practising just the sound they are struggling with, showing them what the shape of my mouth is, where my tongue is, what my lips are doing; ‘th, th, th, th…’ They are adults, they have come to learn, they like us and we like them,it’s not going to hurt their feelings if we try to get them to pronounce things in a standard way!