A few years back, I was teaching two Ukrainian students. Both would be considered around intermediate level. We were reading a text containing some quite difficult words, and in terms of pronunciation, they were having considerable difficulties.
In an attempt to overcome the pronunciation issues, I reverted to a little-used technique I had learned on my TEFL course.
I wrote the target word on the white board, in a form that looked more like the word sounded.
After a long pause, which I initially took as an indication that I had further confounded my student, she turned to me and said…….” why didn’t somebody show me this before”.
It was at this point, I realised that the method of respelling English words whose letter combinations bear no resemblance to how they actually sound, was a technique that every foreign language teacher should consider using as part of their teaching repertoire.
Cillian Hayes
