Having good pronunciation is very important when speaking English. If your pronunciation is good, not only are you better understood, but also you can understand better what is said to you. Many times we don’t understand something, because we don’t recognize a word simply because we don’t know its correct pronunciation.
Pronunciation is a muscular problem. You have to exercise your muscles and put them in the right position to be able to produce a certain sound. One of the big challenges of the teacher is to convince students to put their tongues in a specific place of to move their lips in a different way.
Something I find very useful is to show students scenes from movies and TV programs where they can see the actor clearly doing something with his or her mouth or tongue.
As an example, watch this video I put together using a scene from the TV show “Dallas” in which we can see very clearly the correct pronunciation of the TH sound:
In this scene from “Devious Maids,” the character Carmen tries to get rid of her Puerto Rican accent. Watch what she does:
One funny thing is that even in cartoons you can notice how the characters move their tongues and mouths when making certain sounds.
Watch this scene from “High School USA”, where Amber pronounces the L sound in the words Well.
In Portuguese we pronounce the final L as U. We say, “Braziu”, “aneu”, “pasteu.” But in English the tongue has to touch the back of the upper teeth, and this video shows that very clearly.
In the movie “Hercules”, watch the way Hercules pronounces the word anything:
As I like to tell my students, if this were not important, why would the artists draw the characters’s tongues so clearly?
Pronunciation is a matter of practice. The more we practice, the better it will get. Sometimes students don’t want to do it, because they feel it’s not important or it’s ridiculous. Showing them that native speakers do that all the time, can help motivate them to do it, too.
