Miss Elise
Pronunciation Coach
Transform Your Students’ Pronunciation in One Hour
Comprehensive lesson plans designed for in-depth, engaging classes.
Elevate your ESL teaching with structured, one-hour pronunciation lessons. These detailed plans provide everything you need to guide your students toward confident, clear American English. Perfect for teachers looking to create impactful learning experiences with practical techniques and proven methods.
Or, dive deeper to discover essential habits and techniques for mastering American English pronunciation with confidence.
The Sound of A, as in Father
Part 1: Lead in, 5 min warm up.
Choose one student to read the quote to the class, and then ask your students what they think of the passage. Do they agree or disagree? Why?
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
— Lao Tzu
Part 2: The Sound of A, as in Father
The teacher will read the description of how the letter A is formed and have students mimic her movements. The teacher will then read out just the A sound and have the students repeat it until everyone feels confident that they can adequately produce it.
Description: To produce the vowel sound A (as in father), place the tip of your tongue behind your lower front teeth while relaxing and flattening your tongue. Open your mouth wide and release your breath with a humming sound.
Practice the A sound with students by repeating the following, making only the sound:
A, A, A
A, A, A
A, A, A
A, A, A
Part 3: A Words
Once your students feel confident they can produce the A sound, the teacher will read out the A words slowly, emphasizing the A sound and reviewing any particularly difficult words. Students will repeat after each word is pronounced. The teacher will repeat this exercise twice.
Aria, alms, awe, aha, ark
All, draw, paw, saw, law
Always, yawn, palm, author, aunt
Mamma, spa, Utah, walk, talk
Park, stark, lark, mark, ark
Calm, lawn, Shah, caught, laundry
Part 4: Practice complete sentences emphasizing the A sound.
The teacher will read out one sentence at a time and have students repeat reviewing any challenging words. The teacher will repeat this exercise twice.
1) Aunt Audrey walked to work all the time.
2) Maude said she talked to the man from Utah.
3) Jacques parked the Audi in the yard.
4) He caught the ball in the palm of his hand.
5) The laundry at the spa was filthy.
6) They committed a terrible faux pas when they walked in late.
7) Lonnie likes the calm mornings in Palm Springs.
8) The author repeated the alms before talking to the preacher.
9) The ark was built during the calm before the storm.
10)Mark knew the law well and declared he was always right.
Part 5: Student Practice
When Part 4 is finished, the teacher will ask students if they have any questions or need help with the words and sentences they just practiced. If all is well, students will be placed in pair groups and take turns reading out loud the A words and the sentences to each other, emphasizing the A sound.
Part 6: Informal student test
Once the above exercise is finished, the teacher will randomly choose a A word or a complete sentence and pick a student to read it out loud, correcting any target pronunciation errors as they are made.
Part 7: Tell a A Story
Below you will find a list of names, nouns, verbs, and adjectives with the letter A. Place students in small groups or pairs and give them about 10 minutes to create a A story that they will recite to the class. Make sure that as they develop their story with their classmates, they correctly pronounce the T sound. Circulate around the class, correcting target pronunciation as needed. They may use words outside the list, but whichever group can use the most A words (logically!) and tell the best story wins. This is great for laughs!
Albany - Talk - Crawfish - Caution - Astronaut
Lawyer - Alton - Aunt - Automobile - Walk
Draw - Brawl - Maude - Exhausted - Awful
Audit - Author - Caught - Juan - Thaw
Hawk - Audition - Faucet - Awe - Fawn
Jaunt - Sauce - Fraud - Coleslaw - Crawl
Part 8: Game Time!
If you have time, there is no better way to wrap up a class than with a short game. Just like starting a class with a warmup quote to get students in the learning zone, ending a class on a happy, fun note is a wonderful way to get them excited about returning to your next class. There are numerous pronunciation games, including bingo, rhyming activities, and sound chains. I have attached a few links to get you started.
You can also choose to wrap up your class with something completely different, like placing students in pairs and tackling a few questions from the Conversation Topics or playing a game of hangman or sinking ship.
https://www.tefl.net/elt/ideas/pronunciation/top-fun-pronunciation-games/
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator-english/pronunciation-games-esl/
https://blog.youragora.com/adult-english-learning-esl-games-for-adults