Saturday, January 31, 2026
Pronunciation is something that we often find ourselves telling teachers to do much more when we observe their classes. In many cases, coursebooks devote very little space on the page to pronunciation practice and it can be difficult for teachers to remember to include it in their classes. But, why does pronunciation matter so much? In this blog post, we are going to provide you with the main reasons that pronunciation is an essential part of your lessons and the students’ learning. We’re also going to give you some key ways in which you can easily work on pronunciation in class with your students at any level.
You may think that pronunciation only affected speaking, but that’s not the case. Think about when you read to yourself, what do you do? You read the words aloud in your head and you are pronouncing these words as you think they sound. If you don’t know how the word is pronounced, then you might struggle to read fluently as you have to stop at various words to think about how to say them. In other cases, you might think you know how the words on the page are pronounced, even though you don’t, and this can lead to repetition of the incorrect form every time you read the word.
This also has a knock-on effect when it comes to writing. When we write, we say what we want to say in our heads and then we write it down based on how it sounds and how those phonemes are represented on the page. Students who struggle with pronunciation often have spelling issues too, and a lot of this comes from not practising pronunciation enough in class.
When it comes to listening, if students are not aware of the correct pronunciation of a word, they might have difficulties when identifying that word when they listen to English. This can be the case for individual words, and connected speech, when the pronunciation of some words changes when they are put together in a sentence.
If students make pronunciation mistakes in class and they are not corrected, then this error can become fossilised. Fossilisation of errors occurs when the same mistake is repeated on numerous occasions without being corrected. Because the student is not corrected, they think that it’s correct and continue to produce the language in the same way. Once an error is fossilised it’s much harder for the student to learn the correct form, when or if they are ever made aware of it.
Pronunciation is not something we can learn from a book, we need to practise it in class. A child doesn’t learn the sounds of their language just by being told what to do, they have to use their mouths and refine the sounds they need by practising over and over again. When we use language orally, we articulate the different phonemes in that word using the different muscles in our mouths. When we learn a new language, some of the phonemes we need might not exist in our mother tongue, making it much harder to produce those sounds at the beginning. It’s only with continued and direct practice of those sounds that we learn which muscles we need to use and how to articulate them correctly. Think of it like going to the gym for the first time; you need to strengthen your muscles in order to be able to use the machines or lift any weights. It’s only with time and practice that you get better and are able to achieve your goals. Producing language is the same.
There’s nothing more demotivating for a student than speaking and not being understood, or having a conversation with someone and not understanding what they’ve said. We learn language to communicate, and successfully having a conversation with someone is a key moment in any language learner’s journey. If you are not confident in your pronunciation or you are not understood when you try to speak, this can have a profound impact on a student’s willingness to speak, and they may feel less inclined to start a conversation with someone in English on another occasion.
As we’ve mentioned above, in order to get better at pronunciation, you have to practise. For many students, the fear of saying something incorrectly prevents them from speaking as much as they’d like in class. If, as teachers, we focus on pronunciation in class on a regular basis, this allows student to have a safe space to get better without feeling like they are put on the spot or like they are afraid to say anything. Dealing with pronunciation regularly means that it is just another part of class, and one that all students participate in.
As well as helping with articulation of individual sounds and words, repetition is also an essential part of making sure students are able to recall language when they need to use it. If students just see language a few times in one lesson, and there is no oral repetition, students are going to be at a disadvantage when it comes to trying to remember that language at a later date. If you say a word once, it’s unlikely you are going to remember how it sounds, say a word more than three times and on separate occasions and you are much more likely to remember it and use it.
So, now we know why it’s so important, what are the ways we can incorporate it more in our lessons on a regular basis? Here are 5 simple ways that pronunciation can be practised in class, no matter what content you are covering.
When we introduce any new language, we need to make sure we work on meaning, form and pronunciation. We very often forget the pronunciation part, and move straight on to controlled practice in the coursebook. Ensure that before students do any kind of written practice of the language, you teach the pronunciation of the language, including individual sounds and stress.
Pronunciation errors are amongst the easiest for a teacher to identify and therefore correct. Perhaps we feel bad about correcting a student on their pronunciation, but it’s an essential part of the learning process. You can either correct these errors on the spot, or you can do delayed error correction once the activity has finished, as part of your feedback. If it’s a common error that other students are likely to make, it’s worth drawing everyone’s attention to it so that all students can benefit from the correction.
As we mentioned above, reading and listening are two skills which are directly linked to pronunciation. When it comes to doing a reading or a listening task in class, it’s useful to review the texts beforehand so that you can see which words are more likely to be mispronounced or understood. Go over these as a part of your pre-teaching, so that when students come across them, it won’t affect their ability to read or listen fluently.
If you notice that there are individual phonemes that students pronounce incorrectly on a number of occasions, or that you anticipate students are going to get wrong, then this is a great opportunity for learning. Work on the articulation of these sounds in class and ensure you show/tell students how to use their mouths to produce these sounds. This focussed practice will help students next time they encounter a word that contains that sound.
Connected speech is what happens when we put words together into one utterance (spoken sentence). It has an effect on stress and the value attributed to certain sounds. For example, many function words like a, the and of, are reduced to a schwa sound [ə] and the consonant sound is elided. Producing connected speech features makes a student sound more fluent and it makes it easier for them to be understood. Knowing when and why these features occur will also mean that students are more aware of them when they listen to English being spoken.
To sum up, you cannot rely on students just ‘picking up’ correct pronunciation, it has to be worked on explicitly in class. It should be part of your lesson routine and something that students feel comfortable with because it’s something that they are used to. If you’re interested in finding out more about the subject of pronunciation, you can check out a blog post that was written by Karen, our Head of Teacher Training, after speaking at a conference in Bilbao on the same topic. Find the blog post on our platform: https://london-school-online.com/en/article/practising-pronunciation. Also, don’t forget to check out the webinar on the same topic in our webinar library: https://london-school-online.com/en/webinar.
