🗣️✅ How to Assess Every Student's Pronunciation During Class 🔍

We, language teachers, usually have hundreds of students under our teaching. So running a pronunciation assessment on every single student can be tricky. I mean, is that even possible? When talking about this with colleagues we often end up wondering: "Can students say words clearly?", "Is there any particular sound they're struggling with?", "Is there a quick and easy way to assess their individual process on this aspect?".Furthermore, studies show that up to 25-30% of how well we communicate comes from pronunciation and intonation! 🤯Now that we know how crucial this is, let's delve into effective strategies for pronunciation assessment:

• Friendly approach to pronunciation 🔍
• Ideas for assessing pronunciation in class 📊
• Leveraging the right tools 🛠️
• Free Speaking activities to use with students 🎁

🗣️ What's Pronunciation Actually About? 🔍

Sometimes we tend to think that pronunciation means: saying words perfectly. But in fact, it's about making sure others can understand what we're saying.The goal of pronunciation is producing sounds clearly, so the message doesn't get mixed up. When communicating, we want the other person to hear and understand us well. In other words, it's not about being perfect, but being clear.As we encounter new sounds in the target language, of course there will be some pronunciation challenges. Like for instance: Ñ sound when learning Spanish, the difference between B and V in English, nasal sounds like an, in&on from French, the tones in Chinese...Such new sounds may be a source of frustration for students. So let's celebrate their efforts and encourage them to focus on getting better at producing these sounds. It's just a matter of practice!

"Pronunciation it's not about being perfect, but being clear."

Now that we've reflected on this friendly approach to pronunciation, next we have some easy ways to assess it:

In Class Pronunciation Check-ups 📊

Here are 9 smart ideas to help us figure out how every single one of our students is doing with pronunciation, even with hundreds of students:

1. Use Helpful Guides: Addressing common pronunciation challenges and providing tips to overcome them. We can share guides with students so they also use them to practice on their own and get better faster.
2. Speaking Progress Journal: Getting students to keep track of their pronunciation progress. They can make a journal to write down how they're getting better at speaking. Students can even record their voice and listen to it later to see how they're improving.
3. Focused Pronunciation Sessions: Dedicating specific class sessions or activities to focus solely on pronunciation. During these sessions, we can conduct group activities or exercises to address common pronunciation challenges.
4. Mix Pronunciation with Other Work: When students do presentations or have conversations, let's include pronunciation as a part of their grades. This way, they'll know how important it is to speak clearly, not perfectly!
5. Pick Some Students for Checking: We can't assess everyone at once. So let’s plan specific days to pick a few students randomly every now and then. That way, everyone gets a turn to be checked fairly.
6. Offer Personalized Feedback: A constructive feedback will always help our students to pronounce clearly overtime. Let's point out the improvements they're having, like the sounds they're already able to produce.
7. Let Students Grade Themselves: Let's teach students what to look for when practicing pronunciation in the target language. They can give themselves a grade and see where they need to improve.
8. Try Peer Evaluation: This is about letting students work together to assess each other's pronunciation. We can set certain rules to see how well they're producing the sounds. Let's change the pairs or groups often so everyone can help and learn from each other.
9. Use Technology: We can use language learning apps or softwares that let us know how students are doing with pronunciation. This way, they can practice by themselves and get feedback right away.

Speaking of which, let's move on to the right tools to use when assessing every single student's pronunciation in class:

Leveraging the Right Tools 🛠️

Pronunciation assessment gets easier with Speakable. It's a powerful tool that facilitates efficient assessment of students' pronunciation skills.Speakable allow students to build an initial confidence in them. It's not hoping for pronunciation to be perfect, but understandable.This is how Speakable helps us Language Teachers to assess every student's pronunciation:

• Time-saving grading feature automatically checks pronunciation. No more listening to tons of recordings!

• All recordings are securely stored and neatly organized by student, date or assignment in one platform.

• We can set specific pronunciation guidelines within the app and choose the difficulty level based on our lessons.

• Speakable gives individualized feedback to each student, highlighting areas of improvement to enhance pronunciation.

Share these Pronunciation Activities with Students 🎁

Here are some high quality activities we can use in class to practice pronunciation in 5 different languages:

• French Pronunciation practice: ​Vocab 2 - Numéros 1 à 20​
• English Pronunciation practice: ​Short and Lowel Sounds​
• German Pronunciation practice: ​How to Pronounce DIFFICULT GERMAN CONSONANTS​
• Chinese Pronunciation practice: ​Tone Pair (1+0): Mandarin Mania​
• Spanish Pronunciation practice: ​111 Dalmatians - Survival Kit

All in all...

• Let's remind our students (and ourselves) that pronunciation is about being clear when producing the target language sounds.
• Now we're equipped with practical tips to avoid students (and ourselves) chasing perfection over clarity.
• Using Speakable app in our language teaching can really help us assessing every single student's pronunciation progress.

Any thoughts on this article? Was it helpful? Let us know in the comments below!