A critical incident that happened in class recently was related to pronunciation. As a sessional teacher, I am aware that the teachers I cover for have their own way of dealing with pronunciation so as a rule I generally try to avoid explicit pronunciation lessons instead preferring to intervene when an issue arises. The teachers usually tell me what language points or skills they want me to cover in the lesson, and on this occasion, the teacher asked me to teach the learners intonation and sentence stress.
In some ways, I quite like my role as the ‘cover teacher’. It allows me to test myself by continually having to adapt to different groups of learners at different levels. The downside (apart from the financial aspect) is that there is a lack of continuity which means I don’t really get to see the students progress.
I think my experience and teaching style is suited to cover teaching as I am usually able to quickly establish rapport with the learners and establish a productive learning environment. The class I was covering on this occasion was a large elementary level class with 21 students.
I had prepared some PowerPoint slides which I showed on the smart board. They focused on the types of words which are usually stressed in sentences (content words) and which were not (structure words). Then I played an audio file and asked the learners to listen and repeat and to see if they could hear the words which were stressed. Then I gave them some sentences to say (on another PPT slide) and asked them to try and put stress on the content words.
As I moved around the class monitoring, I realised that the learners weren’t really engaging with the lesson and were either bored or didn’t get what I was trying to show them.
I think partly this was because I had covered them a few times before and my lessons with them had been engaging and enjoyable so maybe their expectations of me as a teacher were now in some way hindering me from achieving my lesson aims.
As a teacher, I have no problem with abandoning a lesson which is failing and doing something more interesting to get the students interest back. But as I was covering a class for another teacher who had specifically asked me to cover intonation and sentence stress, I felt like I couldn’t do that which I felt put me in an awkward position.
This moment of reflection-in-action prompted me to try and solve this problem, so I tried to think of a way that I could match their expectations of a lively and enjoyable lesson with the aims of the lesson. It was very much a ‘thinking on my feet’ moment, and although I wasn’t sure if it would work, I figured it couldn’t be any worse than what was already happening. So I put the learners into seven teams of three and then I gave them all a blank piece of paper. Then assigned each member of the team a sentence to write about themselves:
- Your favourite sport
- What they did last night
- How long they have known their best friend
Then I told the learners the rules for the game. Each group would read out one of their sentences and the other groups would write down the stressed words (which they could decide on either by listening for the stress or identifying them as content words) I told the group that for every correct word they got, their team would receive 1 point.
Although this probably wasn’t the ideal way to teach sentence stress the change in the mood of the class was immediately noticeable, and by adding a competition element, the learners were enthusiastically discussing content words and structure words in their groups.
To follow up, I discussed with their teacher what had happened and asked how they dealt with pronunciation issues with the class. It was interesting to find out that the teacher had also encountered problems trying to focus on this area with this group and said that she had hoped they might respond differently with another teacher.
I think this was an important learning moment for me. I feel like, over the years, I have developed interesting and engaging ways of teaching grammar, vocabulary and specific skills but haven’t developed my pronunciation lessons in the same way. I have encountered this before and felt my pronunciation lessons lacked the energy and learner interest that other lessons have. In the past I believed that this was because that was just the way pronunciation lessons were meant to be. However, learning to reflect on my teaching on this course, I realise that it actually up to me to as a teacher to make the lesson more engaging for the learners. I feel this is unquestionably an area which I need to work on so that I can find a way of teaching pronunciation which more closely matches my teaching style and can engage the learners in the same way my teaching of other language areas does.
