Being an ESL teacher at community colleges and adult learning centers can be a challenging yet rewarding line of work. Adult students can often be more motivated to learn English since they specifically chose to take the course, but the process can require more effort as learning a new language becomes more difficult with age. While there are a variety of challenges both the students and teachers face with adult ESL courses, the most consistent challenge is helping students use correct English pronunciation.
Unlike teaching reading and writing where grammar is typically consistent and can be memorized by students of all nationalities, a student’s native language often interferes with English pronunciation. Far more than just individual sounds, word stress, sentence stress, intonation, and word linking all influence the sound of spoken English and observing students pronunciation takes much further observation over time than other aspects of learning English. Students who want to have a career in the legal field as a paralegal, lawyer or court transcriptionist rely heavily on learning correct English pronunciation from their ESL professors, but unfortunately there’s often too many students and too little time to help students learn English and perfect English pronunciation in their short time together.
That’s where Pronunciation Pro comes in. While in-classroom professors are able to teach students on a wider scale, students can also work online with a certified Speech Pathologist allowing them to get the one-on-one review time that they need.
Depending on students’ native language, Pronunciation Pro can help students learn pronunciation based on their first language. For example, Japanese students are known for confusing /r/ and /l/, as their language contains neither of these but rather has one sound somewhere between the two. As an ESL teacher, picking up on student’s pronunciation requires all students to speak up in the classroom and that can be hard to accomplish because of both time restraints and student’s willingness to speak in front of other classmates. Since Pronunciation Pro can be done online in a one-on-one environment, students are more likely to work on improving English pronunciation when Pronunciation Pro is added to the learning curriculum of adult ESL courses.
Pronunciation Pro is reasonably priced at under $20 a month, or a Basic Package for English Pronunciation for just $97. The benefits of adding English pronunciation and fluency courses to teachers ESL requirements far exceed the cost. As students improve their American English pronunciation in as little as 12 weeks, their confidence in speaking within the classroom setting can be increased dramatically.
