I was discussing some ideas about where to head next with my tutoring. Now that I’ve put up my website for some longer-term, strategic objectives (like teaching strategic thinking itself), I was looking at teaching something to do with languages. I witnessed my Colombian stepmother finally pinning someone down (my father) on the proper pronunciation of “psychiatrist” (the subject was the shooter in that terrible shooting at Ft. Worth).

Apparently a) this wasn’t an easy trick for her, a native Spanish speaker, and b) she’d actually been outright rejected when she asked for help pronouncing it slowly over the preceding seven years. This includes an English tutor paid by the (Canadian) government to help immigrants. The tutor insisted she should learn how to speak it quickly, by hearing it quickly; this approach was, suffice to say, not successful.

Early on when I started tutoring with SuperPass classes, I tried to target things like phrasal verbs, idioms, and vocabulary (with very light sprinkles of grammar). I’m wondering if perhaps my effort was not misplaced; there’s plenty of sources for people to learn grammar, but good speech coaches seem few enough. I’m thinking of focusing on proper pronunciation and ensuring a student walks away able to speak a small body of words well rather than a large body of words poorly.

Having said that, this is new territory for me so… tutors, how should I go about this? Thanks in advance for your various opinions.

English is my second language. One of the things that really helped me, was to record myself (back in the cassette tape days). I had recordings on vocabulary lists, poetry, songs (I was a teen then and memorized songs from the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, the Doors, Supertramp, etc.). It was also helpful to pronounce a difficult word by itself and then in different sentences.
btw, I agree, slow is needed at first. You could ask the students to bring up words that they are struggling with, pronounce them for them and have them repeat. When you pronounce the words for them, you’ll want to exaggerate the intonation a little. If you can, try to teach them a neutral accent (I don’t know where you’re from).

I live in Nova Scotia, Canada and have lived there virtually all my life. Fortunately I’m quite accustomed to stressing intonation while keeping a normal-sounding tone. I aimed for a neutral accent while learning in school, though my style of speech, I’m told, borrows from what’s considered normal in the northeastern US (shared by much of Atlantic Canada’s English-speaking population). It seems about as neutral as anything’s going to get.

The suggestion about different sentences seems important. As for audio, well, obviously I’m not learning the language myself but, I’ve seen a bit of podcasts for English learning…. and according to those few who’ve listened to a recent mp3 I made narrating an article I wrote introducing my Sun Tzu: The Art of War material, I’m doing a pretty good job with my own voice/ audio. Surely I can use that in more than just the classroom too.

Great! Sounds like you will have great success as a speech coach. No reason why you can’t use what you already have recorded. Depending on the level of proficiency of your students, you might want to do a portion of your narration: small chunks for lower levels, bigger chunks for higher levels.

Well, it’s no problem at all to record a few short clips so I’ll have to think about doing that. Thanks for the tips.

Any time :).

Jeremiah… I love the idea of a class for pronunciation I know that when just learning a new word in my own language I sometimes get the inflection in the wrong place or what ever… It must be really hard for someone learning english from scratch… Also some inflections mean different things with words that look the same …for example Desert the noun and desert the verb….

That’s the sort of issue where making sure the student masters one part seems quite vital before adding another version of the word. For that matter, I’m not even sure it’s a good idea to present a different pronciation/ usage/ meaning in the same class and on the same day. I’ll have to ask around about that idea.

I think it would be good to learn them together that way you get the distinction right away and can compare them in your mind rather that having it sneak up on you later….

I think the fact EduFire classes are recorded will be a major virtue in that situation.

I think I’ll have to offer classes and 1 on 1 in that area specifically. What would be the best thing to call it? Intonation, accent within words, stress on syllables, proper emphasis of syllables? There’s different flavors to use but I’m not sure which one would be most correct, and most understandable to non-native speakers.

English pronunciation?

Certainly that’s one thought. If that’s the easiest way to put it, great (and I’ll just add explanation to flesh it out more).

Your classes are going to be really interesting…. cool!!

Hmmm…. maybe it should be called Canadian pronunciation? LOL, joking, but English might mislead people into thinking you’ll teach British English pronunciation.

More than one American politicians could learn from him. So many think they can communicate with humans by either sounding like a HAL voice synthesizer or the prophet on a street corner. Jeremiah knows how to use timing and inflections to accent his thoughts and improve his communications by sounding less plastic without overdoing it.

Thanks for that, Dave. It’s really interesting to get other people’s perspectives. I’m definitely going to make a move with this idea and see how far I can push it.

Edit: Agnes, that IS a good point, actually… I’ll have to be very specific about it.

Jeremiah, I can’t wait to see your classes on speech! Have fun! :)

Well I have taken concrete steps finally.

Free American Speech Coaching

That’s a one-shot (for now!) to take the first step towards acquiring students for this and finding out what times are convenient for people etc etc.

Article: Need an American English Speech Tutor?

This also links to an .mp3 version of the article. Why read about a speech tutor and have to fight to be able to hear him?

New Web Site: Languages for Victory

Though for now, that’s essentially an HTML version of the EduFire article and a host for the mp3 file.

I’m also taking the time to emphasize that I don’t speak with an accent. (I checked with my stepmother from Colombia, who’s heard plenty of accents all over the Americas, to make sure, and she concurred.) If you have it, flaunt it, I guess; English with the widest possible reach is a good thing.

Nicely done!

Very nice! I twitted your class and article.

Thanks Agnes. I need to ramp things back up with Twitter though… right, just remembered. Today’s mission is to make a YouTube video…. and teach the free class of course.

Yes, so many things, it’s hard to keep up!

Now I’m working out how to turn my PowerPoints into an ebook for my Art of War stuff – I would’ve found justifying all that effort harder if I hadn’t had a long-term plan like this. Also if I work on podcasting it might help a lot. We’ll see.

But, for the pure EduFire crowd, I’ll probably push the speech coaching and and maybe teach Japanese once I get organized for it. That’s today’s project.

Just been reading through this whole thread and found it really interesting, especially Alaia’s point about the shifting stress depending on the part of speech. When teaching pronunciation I think it’s useful to make students aware of these patterns as they can be generalised. In most two syllable noun/verbs pairs the stress shifts from the first syllable in a noun to the second syllable in a verb e.g.

a record to record
an import to import
refuse to refuse

If you come across it a great book on teaching pronuncation is Sound Foundations: Learning and Teaching Pronunciation by Adrian Underhill

Hello everybody,

Dr. Carol Fleming, a personal communication coach, offers an interesting resource of articles on her webpage. Also I can only recommend taking a look at the audiobook the sound of your voice I’ve been inspired greatly by her work in facilitating offline voice training workshops.

Also today I conducted part II of my first online course here on edufire and was really impressed by the desire to learn and the new ways of using the conference platform in this specific field.