Pronunciation: Missing Ending Consonants

for #TESL0120

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My pronunciation activity is to help the speaker (Tina) in Speaking Sample 3 to correct her tendency to drop the consonant sound at the end of many words. She seems to be advanced in her knowledge of English, so I believe she could handle the advanced-level video that I will use to explain the pronunciation point, as well as have no difficulty in formulating sentences for the exercise.

PRONUNCIATION ACTIVITY: Final Consonants

TARGET STUDENTS: Advanced students with difficulty pronouncing final consonant sounds, likely students whose L1 is in the Sino-Tibetan family.
IMPLEMENTATION: If many of the class members are having this difficultly, have the students work in pairs in class. If there are only a few, assign it as extra-class work to be done with a partner.

EXTRA CLASS PREPARATION: Before beginning the activity, students should record themselves reading a short paragraph (any source will do) using a smartphone or other recording device. They should listen to themselves, and their partner if possible, and try to hear where they are missing the consonants. If necessary, they could identify the words with ending consonants in the chosen text. After completing the exercise, they should record the same paragraph again to hear their own improvement.

VIEW: Watch the video from time 1:54 to 6:20.

PRACTICE: Using the list of word pairs from page 24 o Pronunciation Practice (Oskowski, 2012), students in pairs should take turns making simple sentences with the words in each pair. (They shouldn't write them, just say them). Each word should be in two sentences. The first sentence should have a word beginning with a vowel after the target word. The second sentence should have the target word at the end of a sentence or have a word beginning with a consonant after it. (The video explains the purpose of this.) After one student says their sentence, the partner should repeat it, and each can indicate to the other if they heard the consonant.

FOLLOWUP: Students should record their paragraph again, and listen for improvement. If time, students could also read their paragraph to the class on a day

RESOURCES:
Frankfurt International School (n.d.), A Guide to Learning English: Language Families, [web page], retrieved from http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/langdiff/ .

IELTS Essentials from IDP (2014), Band 5 – IELTS Speaking test sample – Part 2 (Tina) [video], retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0n_1VEXLK4

Rachel's English (2015), [Advanced] Ending Voiced vs. Unvoiced Consonants - American Accent, [video], retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG95Nc_KV5g .


Oskowski, L (2012, Pronunciation Practice, [PDF document], retrieved from https://currikicdn.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/resourcefiles/55c3243828942.pdf .