Phonemic Practice: The Power of Recycling

Phonemics, Phonetics, Pronunciation, Recycling in Education 0 comments

Phonemic Practice:

The Power of Recycling

As a language student back in the 80s, I can still recall a crucial explanation by one of my university instructors, -an explanation on the importance of “recycling” the material that one covers in any course that you are attending as a student or that you are teaching. My “phonetic” instructor emphasized and pointed out that as a responsible pupil one must move information from one’s short-term memory into our long-term memory. If that “data” movement does not take place, one is bound to forget it and probably lose it as well.

After being teaching English pronunciation for almost ten years at the university level, I have noticed how essential “recycling” what one teaches is to better train students in one’s courses. Although students are not the same if their studying habits are compared, as a teacher one can sense that some do lots of additional practice and others barely review what was studied before. The latter behavior, -at least in my home country-, is quite common and affects language learning and any of the four skills.

Considering Penny Ur’s words on the importance of “language practice in class (Ur 1996), as soon as the language presentation is over, the teacher has to conduct as much practice as necessary (and as much as it can be achieved in one’s class periods). But going beyond Ur’s ELT point, to ensure the achievement of learning objectives for students, it is sensible to “recycle” previous content to assess student understanding and to reinforce their learning.

Because my Pronunciation 1 (One) students have some difficulty with phonetic symbols (and transcriptions), recycling becomes necessary and a must in one’s extensive practice for one’s pupils to fully ensure content comprehension and phonetic rules application. For that reason, once they have some basic knowledge of sounds and symbols (about six to seven weeks of instruction at the university[1]), the recycling begins with four phonemic exercises: phonetic matching, sound recognition, basic transcription, and phonemic reading.

To help the ELT reader visualize how my worksheets have been designed for my students, below you are provided with three of them. The first group of exercises mails deals with the /iy/ or tense “i” in English; the second, with /ɪ/ or lax “i” in English; and the last one, with /ɛ/ or epsilon. However, Part 4 in all three worksheets include all possible sounds already studied through the course.

[1] In our university system in Costa Rica, a single term lasts for 15 weeks. So when I begin the recycling of contents, at least a third of the course has been covered.

Phonemic Practice for Tense i.pdf by Jonathan Acuña

Phonemic Practice for Lax i.pdf by Jonathan Acuña

Phonemic Practice for epsilon.pdf by Jonathan Acuña

To sum up, these recycling tasks have proved quite helpful for my pronunciation students. It can be assumed that similar worksheets with this philosophy of content recycling for thematic units other than pronunciation can trigger some good and positive learning reinforcement and objective accomplishment.

ETo fully develop and comprehend this teaching issue, it’s advisable to research and expand these areas:

1	Short-term vs. long-term memory
2	Recycling in language teaching
3	Recycling in language learning
4	Recycling in phonemic teaching
5	Tasks to reinforce learning