Thursday, April 16, 2026

Teaching Pronunciation to Teens and Young Learners

 

Teaching Pronunciation to Teens and Young Learners

-Mark Cormier, 2026



Introduction: This blog contains the activities, and support material for a two hour interactive workshop given on April 17, 2026 for trainees of Peace Corps Costa Rica.   

Session Goals: In today's session we will ...
  • Explore the English sound system to discover 10 key concepts in pronunciation teaching.
  • Participate in a variety of pronunciation activity types that are appropriate for teens and young learners.
  • Create an original proposal for a pronunciation instructional sequence using the RAP framework.
  • Consider a collection of complementary resources to help you learn more about English phonetics and phonology and the teaching of pronunciation. 

Guiding Questions: By the end of the session, you should be able to answer ...
  • Why is pronunciation instruction an essential but challenging task for teachers?
  • What kinds of pronunciation activities might be engaging for my student population?
  • How can I design an effective instructional sequence for a pronunciation lesson?
  • How can I learn more about pronunciation teaching and the English sound system?




Table of Contents

Click the links below to access the section of the blog you would like to see.














Diagnostic Survey: Key Concepts in English Pronunciation



Warm Up: What do I know about this? 


Instructions: Find your link below and take the diagnostic survey. 









Information: Key Concepts in English Pronunciation



Task 1: Who owns the English language? 


Instructions: Discuss the three questions below. 

  • How many native speakers of English are there in the world?
    • A) 100 million
    • B) 400 million
    • C) 800 million
    • D) 1 billion

  • How many people in the world speak English as a second or foreign language?
    • A) 500 million
    • B) 800 million
    • C) 1 billion
    • D) 3 billion

  • Which of these countries has the most English speakers?
    • A) England
    • B) Egypt
    • C) Australia
    • D) Nigeria







Task 2: What is considered an English speaking country? 


Instructions: Linguist Braj Kachru's (1985) circles of English model provides an early framework for "World Englishes", acknowledging the diverse varieties of English in use around the world. Read the descriptions of the three circles and think of some countries that exemplify each one.



Click to view full sized image. 


  • How might Tasks 1 and 2 help frame the goals of pronunciation instruction?








🔑Key Concept 1: English is an international language and non-native speakers are legitimate users of the language. The goal of second language pronunciation instruction, therefore, should be to increase students' intelligibility, not to create "imitation" native speakers or to hide their foreignness.







Task 3: Sound and Spelling


Instructions: Read the following words aloud. How are the bold letters pronounced? Can all the letters be pronounced in isolation? Why or why not?
  • Top
  • Better
  • Fun
  • Pan 
  • Physics
  • Comb
  • Eye
  • Line
  • Might
  • Bath
  • Bathe

What about the pronunciation of these letters within the same word? Do they have the same sound?

  • Banana
  • Calculator
  • Academic

  • How does this fact complicate the process of teaching pronunciation?








🔑Key Concept 2: Letters are not sounds and English spelling is not phonetic. 








Task 4: Units of Sound


Instructions: Read these three word lists. How are the words in each list similar and different? What additional words could you add to each list to maintain the pattern? 

  • Hit, Mit, Lit, Fit ...
  • Hip, Hid, Hill, Hiss ...
  • Hip, Hop, Hope, Hype, Heap ...









🔑Key Concept 3: The smallest unit of sound in a language that carries meaning is called a phoneme. It carries meaning because changing one of them in a word results in a new word or a non-word. Two words that differ by only one phoneme are called a minimal pair.








Task 5: Types of Sound Units 


Instructions: There are two broad classes of phonemes. Read the words below. Then pronounce only the highlighted phonemes in each word. Be sure you pronounce the sound, not the name of the letter. If you had to classify these sounds into two groups, how would you divide them and why?

  • Pound, Sleep, Slow, Try, While, Example, Build, Weight, Chain, Sponge, Car, Color, Finish

  • What other English sounds could you put in each category?








🔑Key Concept 4: A consonant is a phoneme produced by obstructing the air stream as it exits the mouth and a vowel is a phoneme produced with no obstruction.








Task 6: Consonant Classifications


Instructions: Read the words in List 1 carefully and pay close attention to the consonant sounds marked in bold. What parts of your mouth are used to obstruct the air stream and produce the consonant sounds? If you don't know the technical name of these body parts, describe them or open your mouth and point to them.


Click to view full sized image. 

Now complete List 2 with words from the word bank by matching them with words from List 1 that are produced using the same parts of the mouth. 









🔑Key Concept 5: The location of the obstruction of the air stream is called the place of articulation and the way the air is obstructed is called the manner of articulation.








Task 7: Other Consonant Parameters 


Instructions: Put your finger on your Adam's apple and pronounce the consonant sounds in the following word carefully. Be sure to isolate the consonant sound so you do not accidentally pronounce the vowel sound that occurs before or after it. Tell your partner if you feel a distinct vibration when you pronounce the consonant. Think of three additional words not in the list and classify their consonants as having vibration or not. 

  • Pressure, Abrasion, Variation, Neither, Chase, Business, Teacher, Listen, Jupiter
Now, look back at the pairs of consonant sounds between Lists 1 and 2 in Task 6. What is the only difference in the way each pair of consonants is pronounced?









🔑Key Concept 6: Consonants are either voiced or unvoiced meaning they either include vibration in the vocal cords or they do not. 








Task 8: Sounds Working Together


Instructions: Look at the two lists of sentences below and pay close attention to the pronunciation of the final D and S sounds of the verbs. How many different sounds to these letters make? What are the specific sounds? What could explain this? 

  • I played video games. 
  • I watched TV.
  • I needed a doctor.

  • She hates taking the bus.
  • He lives in France.
  • She teaches English. 

Think of some additional verbs with ED and S endings. How is the final consonant pronounced?








🔑Key Concept 7: The pronunciation of individual sounds is often influenced by the sounds that come before and after them. The area of study that looks at how sounds of a language interact is called phonology. 








Task 9: Vowel Variety    


Discuss: 
  • How many vowel letters are there in English? 
  • How many vowel sounds are there in American English?

Instructions: Try reading these words. How many distinct vowel sounds can you identify? Each of the underlined words has a repeated vowel sound somewhere in the list. Can you find them?

  • Good
  • High
  • Clap
  • Spoon
  • Autumn
  • Worry
  • Clock
  • Historic
  • While
  • No
  • Won
  • Bird
  • Hunch
  • About







Task 10: Exploring the Vowel Space   




Instructions: Look at the chart and complete the following tasks with your partner.

  • Switch quickly back and forth between 1 and 2. What does your tongue do? Your lips?
  • Switch quickly between 1 and 3. What does your jaw do?
  • Switch quickly between 3 and 4. What does your tongue do? Your lips?
  • Switch slowly between 1 and 4. What changes do you notice?
  • Switch between 1 and 5, 2 and 5, 3 and 5, etc. What happens to the muscles of your mouth when you move to 5?







🔑Key Concept 8: Vowels are classified by the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth, the position of the jaw, and the shape of the lips when vowels are produced. 








Task 11: Our Most Common Vowel   


Instructions: The commonly written letter in English is ____. However, the most comply pronounced vowel is quite mysterious. Pronounce the bold sound in the following words.  

  • Ugly, Upper, Onion, Month, Trouble, Flood, Cover up, Mother's brother, Bubble gum

Now, read each phrase below. Can you identify that same sound in all of the underlined words?

  • Richmond is the capital of Virginia.
  • Run along a famous Costa Rican beach.
  • A Canadian medical journal.
  • The elephant shared a banana with a monkey.






🔑Key Concept 9: The most common vowel sound in English is the schwa. It is also known as the lazy vowel because it only occurs in unstressed syllables and any written vowel letter can be pronounced with this sound.








Task 12: One More Thing about Vowels   


Instructions: There are two major classes of vowels. Read these vowel sounds slowly. How does the sound change from the beginning to the end of each vowel?

  • Hate
  • Height
  • Toy
  • Plow
  • Boat







🔑Key Concept 10: Most vowels are monophthongs consisting of a single sound but some vowels can blend together to form a diphthong. 









Practice: Strategies to Plan a Pronunciation Lesson



RAP: Three Stage Framework for Pronunciation Instruction


This is a helpful threee-stage framework to use when planning a pronunciation lesson or when responding to pronunciation errors you notice in class. 

  • (R) Recognize: Sometimes students can't hear the difference between sounds of English that don't exist in their first language and instead hear it as an approximation of the closest sound in their L1 (ex. "Jess" instead of "yes"). If students are not aware of the difference, they will not be able to produce the sound correctly. Recognition activities are listening exercises focused on helping students identify the sounds.
  • (A) Articulate: Once students can reliably recognize the sound, it's time to help them learn to articulate it. Teachers should model and describe what is happening in the mouth so that students can learn to produce the sound correctly. Visual aids, gestures, and exaggerated articulation of the sounds in a silly way are very helpful at this stage.  
  • (P) Produce / Practice: Now it's time to help students produce the sound on their own. There are tons of activities you can do including stories, rhymes, songs, minimal pair drills, and many more. The important thing is to provide students with plenty of examples of the target sound an expose them to different spelling combinations and examples of the sound at the beginning, middle, and end of words. 

The next section contains a variety of activities and resources that can be used at different stages of the RAP framework. Each one is labeled to let you know which stage it works best for.








Visual Activities


Although pronunciation involves sound, visuals can serve an important role. Students love expressing their creativity through art. There are many simple and fun activities you can do that include drawing, coloring, or other forms of visual representation. 

Click to view the full sized image.

  • The Color Vowel Chart (RAP): The Color Vowel Chart is a very versatile tool for teaching the English vowel system. Work on individual sounds or help students learn to identify the color of a word by its primary stressed vowel with a color. The chart can be used in recognition, articulation, and production activities. 
      • Demonstration: Read the list of words below. What color are they? In multisyllable words, identify the color of the vowel in the syllable that recieves primary stress. 
        • Chicken
        • Oil
        • Raisins
        • Noodles
        • Coconut
        • Sausage
        • Mushrooms
        • Peaches
        • Flour

    • Mark Syllable Stress (RAP): Incorrect syllable stress in multisyllable words really hurts intelligibility. It is good teaching practice to mark syllable stress when introducing new words. You can do this in a simple way by drawing circles above the words to represent each syllable and make the primary syllable circle larger than the others. You can also give a marker to a student and have them draw the circles as you pronounce each word.  How would you mark these words?
      • Demonstrate
      • Introduce
      • Explanation
      • Incorrect
      • Particularly 
      • Energy
      • Pronunciation
    • You can also help students get better at reading aloud by giving them short texts that you separate into brief phrases on different lines with the mutisyllable words marked. If students already know all the words, have them first identify and underline all multisyllable words, then draw the syllable stress circles, and practice reading with their partner.









    Kinesthetic Activities


    You can use activities that involve gestures, movement, or tactile stimulation to practice pronunciation.

    • TPR Variations (R): Total Physical Response (TPR) is a teaching method that involves giving commands for students to follow. This is particularly helpful in recognition activities. "When you hear the sound, raise your hand, stomp your foot, snap your fingers, step to the right, step to the left, etc. You can also put two sounds on the board and say different words and students need to slap the sound they hear. 

    • Gestures (A): Gestures and facial expressions can be used to demonstrate or elicit sounds. Exaggerated facial and hand movements can be used for challenging vowel and consonant sounds. What getures might you use to accompany the explanation of these sounds: Ship, Chip, Blue, Goat, Wood, etc. 

    • Intonation Hands (R/P): You can have students use their hand, finger, or pencil to to follow the rising and falling intonation patterns of English. Read the questions below and use your hand to mimic the rising and falling intonation. Think of a few more questions of your own.
      • Yes / No Questions: These questions end in rising intonation. 
        • Do you like Costa Rica?
        • Are you a student?
        • Did you go to the beach?

      • Information Questions: These questions raise slightly on the last word and then fall. 
        • Where are from?
        • What's the capital of Honduras?
        • Why are late?

      • Constrastive Intonation: When comparing or contrasting two things, the first item gets rising intonation and the second gets falling intonation.
        • Do you want coffee or tea?
        • I thing soccer is more exciting than basketball.
        • Do you prefer to teach grammar or vocabulary?

      • Intonation in Lists: In lists each item gets rising intonation until the last one which is falling. 
        • Last summer she went to Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Italy.
        • For hamburger toppings we have cheese, pickles, ketchup, and mustard.
        • Whether you want to swim, surf, or just work on your tan, this beach has everything you need for the perfect summer holiday.








    Oral Activities


    There are lots of oral activities you can do to help your students produce sounds. Kids especially love songs and stories. They provide the opportunity for lots of meaningful repetition of the target sounds.

    • Tongue Twisters (P): Tongue twisters can provide a funny challenge for students. Use your old favorites, make up your own, or get help from an AI tool. 
      • Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't very fuzzy, was he?
      • How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
      • I slid the sheet, the sheet I slit and on the slitted sheet I sit.
      • She sells seashells by the seashore.

    • Chants (P): Chants are rhythmic songs led by the teacher that involve clapping. The site esl4kids.net/chants.html has lots of resources like this one. 
      • B says B like Baseball
      • B says B B B
      • C says C like Cookie
      • C says C C C
      • D says D like Dinosaur
      • D says D D D

    • Singalongs (P): Young children love to sing (older children not so much). There are tons of ESL songs for kids on YouTube about any topic you can think of. Most ahve words, gestures, and dance moves!

    • Collaborative Storytelling (P): Incorporate pronunciation focus in your storytelling activities by including words with they sounds they are studying. Make the story interactive by eliciting the keywords from students at different moments. 









    Phonemic Awareness


    Pronunciation is a key feature of early literacy development. To be able to decode texts, students need to learn to identify sounds in words and associate sounds with letter combinations. 

    • Elkonin Box Variations (R): There are a number of teaching strategies to help students learn segmentation, the ability to identify the individual sounds that make up a word. The Reading Rockets website listed in the resources sectionhas more information on how to use this tool.  


      • Move tokens into the Elkonin boxes to identify the number of sounds.
      • Raise fingers to indicate the number of sounds.
      • Write the letters that represent each sound in their corresponding box.
      • Have students stand on squares or pieces of tape representing the boxes. Have them sound out their part of the word. 
      • What else could you do to practice segmentation?


    • Syllable Identification (RAP): Have students clap out the number of syllables in a word. To practice syllable stress, students can snap the unstressed syllables and clap the stressed one. Alternatively, they can use the Elkonin box and move the token of the stressed syllable higher in the box. You can also have students stand in a line with each student representing a syllable. They sound out their syllables and the one with the stressed syllable does a little dance or makes a gesture. 







    Games


    Kids and teens love to play games and compete. Learning should be fun and there are many simple games that you can use to practice pronunciation. 

    • Concentration (P): Students flip over two cards in an attempt to match words with a similar sound. If they make a match, the get a point and can try again. If they fail to match, they flip the cards back over and it's the next person's turn. 

    • Board Game Variation (P): Create a simple board game worksheet by drawing a loop of connected squares. In each square leave a mix of items to respond to such as: pronounce the stated word, say a rhyming word, choose the correct word for the blank between two minimal pair options, use the word in an original sentence, ask a question with the word, etc. 

    • Flip a Coin (P): Depending on the outcome of the coin flip, students read a sentence or answer a question from one of two lists or one of two staks of cards or slips of paper. Each list or stack should have them practice a particular sound.

    • Tic-Tac-Toe (P): Instead of X vs O, students are assigned contrasting sounds and they need to write words with their sounds in each box. 

    • Vowel Bingo (R/P): Create a set of BINGO cards but instead of numbers, include words that students know with one of the vowel sounds marked in bold. In each round, the teacher pronounces a vowel sound and studnets need to mark the words on their card that have that sound. The winner can be the pronouncer for the next round.

    • Pronunciation Maze (P): Students have to cross a grid of blocks (hexagons work best) by connecting words that have the same sound. This website has lots of them.


    Click to view the full sized image.












    Application: Propose an Activity Sequence




    Plan your RAP Lesson Outline: 

    Instructions: Below you will find a list of sounds that are usually challenging for native Spanish speakers. Choose one or two of them and propose an activity sequence following the RAP framework to help students recognize, articulate, and practice them. 

    • /i/ (beat) vs /I/ (bit)
    • /t/ (tank) vs /θ/ (this)
    • /d/ (dish) vs /ð/ (this)
    • /s/ (bus) vs /z/ (buzz)
    • /æ/ (black) vs /a/ (block)
    • /ÊŠ/ (hook) vs /u/ (fluke)
    • /ʃ/ (ship) vs /tʃ/ (chip)
    • /j/ (yes) vs /dÊ’/ (Jess)
    • /ʃ/ (pressure) vs /Ê’/ (pleasure)







    Wrap Up: Exit Ticket and Reflection

    Instructions: Let's see how much you learned today? CLICK HERE to take the diagnostic survey again and compare your score! 










    Resources: Materials for Further Study

    • Book: English Pronunciation Made Simple (Dale & Poms, 2005)
    • Book: Beyond Repeat After Me: Teachign Pronunciation to English Learners (Yoshida, 2016)
    • Webinar: Make Pronunciation Lessons Fun and Colorful Again with Color Vowel (Colak, 2023)
    • Webinar: Integrated Pronunciation Instruction for Increased Intelligibility (McCurdy, 2023)






    References:

    Kachru, B. B. (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English language in the outer circle. In R. Quirk & H. G. Widdowson (Eds.) English in the World: Teaching and Learning the Language and Literatures (pp. 11-30). Cambridge University Press.














    Session Details and Author Information

    Session Title: Teaching Pronunciation to Teens and Young Learners

    Session Abstract: This session provides a crash course on the English sound system. By participating in a series of interactive exploration tasks, participants will discover 10 key concepts in English pronunciation instruction. They will also learn a simple three-stage framework for designing pronunciation instruction and consider a collection of different activity types to help students practice new sounds. 

    Author: Mark Foster Cormier

    Author Bio: Mark Foster Cormier is an English teacher and teacher educator who is passionate about materials development, reflective practice, and professional development in ELT. He earned a master of arts in TESOL from Marlboro College and bachelor’s degrees in English teaching and Latin American studies from Universidad Americana and Appalachian State University. Mark has been an EFL teacher in Costa Rica for 17 years and has specialized in teacher development for over a decade. He currently works as Head of Training and Educational Quality at Centro Cultural Costarricense Norteamericano where he is in charge of new teacher recruiting and training, planning ongoing professional development initiatives, and hosting the monthly webinar series for language teachers called PD Talks: Professional Development Sessions. Click here to connect with Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-cormier-elt/
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