Introduction

This website contains pronunciation activities designed to aid Hungarian English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers in successfully integrating pronunciation into their lessons. Pronunciation teaching is an area of English language teaching that is often sidelined in favour of other skills – this is partly attributable to the fact that learners with different native languages will have entirely different difficulties with English pronunciation, and as nearly all coursebooks used in EFL teaching are intended for international audiences, teachers teaching monolingual groups are likely to find that most of the pronunciation activities in the coursebook (if there are any at all) are not helpful for their students. Our activities are tailored to the needs of Hungarian learners of English, and we also did our best to make sure that none of them focuses on practising English pronunciation for its own sake, but they develop students’ speaking and listening skills as well. We are hopeful that our materials will enable teachers to teach pronunciation in a more interactive and communicative manner.

The activities are organised around five topics. Each of them starts with a blurb briefly summarising the pronunciation problem, supplemented by a detailed “Read more…” section, in which we provide background information on the difficulty faced by Hungarian learners. Below the blurbs, you may find our exercises, together with recommended procedures, print-ready handouts and other materials. The “Read more…” sections as well as the procedures are genuinely user-friendly both in terms of content and language: they contain nothing more or less than what is really essential to understand in order to teach a particular feature/issue, and the texts are completely devoid of technical terms so as not to overburden teachers with too many phonetic/phonological details. The materials on the website are also downloadable in two complete collections: an extended version of the background explanations is available in the form of a handbook, and the activities have been compiled into an activity booklet. The links to both are available in the box to the right.

Pronunciation activities

Links

Homophones

Homophones are words with different meaning that are pronounced the same but may be spelt differently (e.g., know and no, bear and bare, etc.). There are numerous such examples in English resulting from the peculiarities of English letter-to-sound rules, but they are quite rare in Hungarian due to the predominantly phonemic spelling system of the language. Homophones therefore constitute a potential source of difficulty for the Hungarian learner of English. Read more >>

ACTIVITIES:

Digital detox
handout | procedure | frontal check slideshow
Apart from familiarising students with the notion of homophones and raising their awareness of some words with irregular pronunciation, this activity also teaches students how to determine if two words are pronounced the same or not by comparing the phonemic transcriptions of the two words in question (which is possible to do even without being able to actually read phonemic script). By the end of the activity, students will have understood why this method is more reliable than listening to audio recordings in online dictionaries.

Storytelling pronunciation race
handout | procedure
A follow-up to the "Digital detox" activity. Students practise the pronunciation of the words from the "Digital detox" activity in the course of a storytelling race. The activity focuses on those members of homophone pairs which have a counterintuitive pronunciation and which are therefore frequently mispronounced.

Homophones song bingo
handout A2 | handout B2 | procedure
A follow-up to the "Digital detox" activity. Students listen to a song and improve their conscious knowledge of homophones and their spellings in the course of a classic Bingo game.

The -ed suffix

Pronouncing kissed as [kizd], pushed as [puzsd], etc. is one of the most salient features of Hungarian-accented English. (The last two consonants of these two examples should be the same as those of the Hungarian words liszt 'flour' and most 'now', respectively). The -ed suffix (used to mark both the past tense and the past participle of regular verbs) may be pronounced in three different ways, and the choice between the forms is primarily based on whether the last sound of the root verb is voiced or voiceless. Out of its three forms, the /t/ pronunciation of the suffix may be problematic even for advanced-level Hungarian learners due to the opposite direction of voicing assimilation in English and Hungarian. Read more >>

Introducing the -ed suffix
handout | procedure | cards
In the course of this activity, students brush up on their knowledge of voiced and voiceless sounds and voicing assimilation (which they are supposed to have learnt in Hungarian grammar in 5th grade at the latest), and they learn the rule for the pronunciation of the -ed suffix in English while comparing the direction of assimilation in English and Hungarian (which works in opposite ways in the two languages).

-ed suffix card game
procedure | cards
Students practise pronouncing the three forms of the -ed suffix in the course of a "say a sentence with the word" card game involving past tense verb forms.

/t/ forms hunt
procedure
Students increase their awareness of the /t/ form of the -ed suffix by finding words in a video in which the suffix is pronounced /t/ (as that is the one out of the three forms of the suffix that is the most problematic for Hungarians).

Letter-to-sound rules

Dearest creature in creation,
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
[...]
Finally: which rhymes with "enough",
Though, through, plough, cough, hough, or tough?
Hiccough has the sound of "cup"...
My advice is – give it up!

These lines are the first and last stanzas of the famous poem "The Chaos", which was written by Gerard Nolst Trenité with the aim of drawing attention to the irregularities of English letter-to-sound correspondences. While such poems are indeed entertaining, there is a danger that they discourage learners as they create the false impression that English spelling is totally idiosyncratic and therefore unlearnable. However, the truth is that the majority of English words are pronounced according to a set of predictable (and learnable) rules, and the regular examples vastly outnumber the irregular ones that poems like "The Chaos" enjoy pinpointing. So, instead of the message conveyed by the poem above, our advice is: don't give it up, but rely on your knowledge or intuitions of the regularities, and it is enough to memorise the words that are irregular. Read more >>

ACTIVITIES:

Find the odd one out
handout | procedure
A modified version of a similar exercise in English File Advanced 3rd ed., Module 2A (p. 15). The task is to look at groups of five words containing a given letter or combination of letters, and find the example (if there is one in the group) in which the letter(s) in question are not pronounced the same as in the other four words. The odd words out illustrate exceptions to the letter-to-sound regularities. The lines containing no odd word out call attention to spelling rules that do not have exceptions.

Unstressed syllables

English unstressed syllables constitute a major source of difficulty for Hungarian learners of the language due to the many differences in the stress systems of the two languages. While in Hungarian it is always the first syllable of words that is stressed, stress may fall on any syllable in English words, and the rules governing stress placement are too complex to be of much help to learners. There are also a lot of processes that affect unstressed syllables, such as vowel reduction and grammar words pronounced in their weak form, both of which involve pronouncing the vowel called schwa in places where non-native speakers would expect other (stressed) vowels to occur. These are just a few stress-related issues that cause difficulties for Hungarians both in terms of being intelligible and understanding native speakers. Read more >>

ACTIVITIES:

Stress in English and in Hungarian
handout 1 | handout 2 | procedure | frontal check slideshow
Stress-related activities found in language coursebooks (if there are any at all) are often restricted to "underline the stressed syllable" and "listen and repeat" tasks. What these activities fail to take into consideration is the fact that learners who are stress deaf (i.e., who are unable to perceive differences between stressed or unstressed syllables) will not be able to find the syllables to be underlined. Without prior training, learners suffering from this condition (which is highly likely to affect Hungarians) may completely misunderstand the concept of stress (and mistake stress for vowel length for example) and may therefore perform badly in such task types, which will inevitably damage their confidence and kill their motivation. The activity here provides all the background that is necessary for students to be able to perceive stress properly and be prepared for the classic coursebook activities focusing on stress.

Introducing the schwa
handout | procedure | frontal check slideshow
After familiarising themselves with how the schwa sounds, students try to guess how many schwas there are in a set of words. The words compiled are full of schwas that Hungarians are more than likely to mistake for other vowels, so the students will almost certainly be shocked to discover that those vowels are actually schwas. The activity also teaches students how to recognise and write the IPA symbol of the schwa, so that they will be able to check autonomously and reliably if there are schwa sounds in a word (even if they have trouble hearing the sound).

Schwa shopping game
slideshow | procedure | cards
Students practise pronouncing the schwa in the unstressed syllables of content words. The game is a roleplay between shop assistants and customers, and the items to be sold/bought contain schwas.

Schwa in grammar words
handout | procedure | frontal check slideshow | recording
In this activity, students look at four sentences consisting solely of one-syllable words, and their task is to circle those words in which the vowel sound is a schwa. The activity makes students realise that one-syllable content words cannot contain a schwa (as content words are important and are therefore stressed), and schwas will only occur in grammar words in these sentences. Non-native speakers are usually unaware of the fact that a lot of grammar words such as will, would, and, but, as, from, of, was, etc. are pronounced with a schwa in most cases -- learners may therefore have difficulty recognising these words and thus processing spoken English. The activity involves the most important grammar words that are problematic in this respect and raises students' awareness of how these words are pronounced in native English speech.

Accents of English

As the English language is spoken by millions of speakers all around the globe, it has inevitably developed numerous pronunciation varieties that differ substantially from the reference varieties taught in the EFL classroom. Not being familiar with certain non-standard pronunciation features may sometimes give students the impression that "real" English is not the same as what is taught to them in the classroom. This is because some pronunciation features may make words sound so different from their standard forms that not knowing what to expect to hear from some speakers may hinder word recognition and thus be an obstacle in listening comprehension. By learning how to recognise a few characteristic features specific to certain lesser-known varieties of the language, students can improve their listening skills significantly, which facilitates successful communication.

ACTIVITIES:

Recognising accents
handout | key | procedure | frontal check slideshow
In the course of this activity, students familiarise themselves with some non-standard pronunciation varieties and how they differ from the British and the American standards. The features introduced in the activity are the common characteristics of accents spoken in North of England, and the most salient pronunciation features of Scottish English, the working-class London accent called Cockney, and New Zealand English. The activity involves a listening task in which students have to identify accents based on the characteristic features they have learnt.

Accents quiz
handout | procedure | recordings
A follow-up to the "Recognising accents" activity. Students listen to twelve sound recordings and try to determine where the speakers are from.