Liam Furman Uozu Technical SHS Pronunciation & Listening

Tongue Twisting Battleships

Target Audience: SHS (although it should work for younger students)

Objective: To give the students an opportunity to practice listening to and saying words with subtle differences in pronunciation, and to receive immediate feedback on their abilities.

Materials: Worksheet (included)

Procedure:

Give each student a worksheet

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Pronunciation Tree (10 min)

This idea is courtesy of one of Venesa Tomlin’s contributions to an earlier handbook. See the two “trees”from Part 1 of the worksheet. Read a word from the top of the tree to the class. Students must guess which one of the two words the ALT read, and then follow the corresponding branch down the tree. Next, read a word from the second level of the tree. Again, the students must guess that word and move down a level. This continues until the bottom of the tree is reached and students circle the number of the “leaf” where they ended. Go through all the numbers and ask students to raise their hands when their answer is called. Give a reward to students who were correct. Repeat the game with the second tree.

If you count the number of students that raise their hand for each answer, it tells you where most went wrong. You can then practice these pairs of words with your class, highlighting the differences between them.

Tongue Twisters (15 min)

The worksheet has a list of several tongue twisters. Practice saying each one with the class. Next, explain that there will be a contest to find the King of Tongue Twisters. A row of students is told to stand and allocated a tongue twister. Whichever student finishes first and raises his/her hand, is the winner from that row. Go through all the rows, using a different tongue twister each time. Finally, the winners from each row must stand and compete to find the champion. This should be a difficult, long tongue twister. Make a big fuss and reward the champion.

Battleships (20 min)

Pair the students and ask them to play battleships using the grids printed on their worksheets. The twist here is that instead of calling out a square using a letter and number (e.g. A4), they must use the word written on that square. Note the subtle differences in pronunciation of the words on the squares. Get them to say in English “that was a miss/hit” and “you sank my ship”.

If your students haven’t played battleships before, it can take some time to explain the rules. I recommend that you and your JTE draw smaller 5x5 grids on the board and demonstrate ship placement and a few turns. Also, the students probably won’t finish their games in 20 min, but if they were having fun, then they can continue on their own.