A. Teaching pronunciation: begin at the beginning This is just to say ... English is another language in my life. “There is no reason why you can’t learn a language on your own. It is a heavy undertaking, but a challenging and exciting one. You’ll just have to pay extra attention to the problems of keeping up your incentive and getting your hands on good language materials. A few words of caution as you set off on your language venture: you aren’t going to be able to operate as well outside your classroom as if you were in it”. Teachers acknowledge they are not well instructed in the field of phonetics, neither in the practical use of the reference books we browse in our departments. Any quick glimpse at the materials available in any English department will show to any faithful teacher that the bulk of learning materials relies on Teaching Grammar, then on Vocabulary acquisition (less than half). Probably, the smallest section is on Teaching pronunciation (or perhaps methodology?). Penny Ur (2012), in her four chapters in Part II Teaching the What, mentions the three domains: Teaching Pronunciation; Teaching Vocabulary; Teaching grammar. She then adds topics, situations, notions, functions. We guess more attention should be paid to pronunciation. Facing the question why teachers do not focus students’ work on pronunciation, we can ask the old question “How much can we teach about it”? We normally feel confident about language materials, even online, where we can use them for homework advice, but we are not used to making the learners study/buy the very good resources on practical pronunciation language exercises. In our case, the learners had to produce oral work, and were asked to observe their pronunciation though two different recording techniques. In every class we had some new input and shared students’ materials, plus the feedback from some learners’ homework. After 15 pieces every student felt confident about their own production and felt they were more observant of their own mistakes as well. They were students on a blended learning programme at EOI Castelló (where teachers began working on a pioneer distance-learning modality started by Amadeu Marin in 1999). Later on, a website was created collecting all the work done: https://sites.google. com/site/mangelcastenglishlearner/home The learners had to feed their ORAL portfolios. That was the instruction given: “Assemble your self-recording & analysing assignments (a minimum of five), together with a minimum of five Parallel Readings into your Speaking Dossier. Submit them to the tutor. Study the relevant strategy sheets for a description of both techniques from previous learners. You should organise your homework in a file, in which you will collect the Self-recording & Analysing activities, the Parallel Reading texts, plus a final Catalogue of Speaking difficulties. These study techniques are a fundamental means of improving your pronunciation, your fluency and the quality of your spoken language; study the relevant strategy sheets for a description of both”. In this article we will show real students’ work, so we focus on their own production (with some tutor comments) in three categories covering oral production techniques: Common groundoral techniques; Parallel Reading technique; and Analyse my recordings. For the record, there are about 24 worksheets altogether in the website; the students on the 4th level were making their contributions and frequently after the 3rd piece they could get the knack of it. Everybody agreed that by the 7th try they had got confident about their work, Those who continued on the 5th level could often suggest improvement measures, which were welcome! The article finishes with some Food For Thought to round off our teaching work.
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