Thinking Out Loud

This advanced pronunciation course builds on a student’s basic understanding of the sounds and speech patterns of English with a focus on suprasegmental skills, such as stress, thought groups, intonation, linking, and phonological changes. Upon completion of the course, students should be able to apply the process of developing pronunciation skills and be able to identify and correct pronunciation problems in order to produce clearly understandable English in an academic setting.

One special feature is the inclusion of meaningful scripts and prompts for pronunciation diagnostics and practice that incorporate themes from Tema Okun’s descriptions of characteristics of white supremacy culture.  These ideas, therefore, provide meaningful topics in which to explore our cultures and ourselves. They provide motivation for communication practice.

Each unit includes:

• Learning objectives stated clearly and concretely

• Student-friendly description of why these particular features are important to study 

• Discrete examples to help students notice sounds and their patterns

• Clearly written rules to explicitly explain how sounds and patterns happen

• Short tasks that practice the sounds with exercises that elicit the target sounds and patterns

• A content-rich article at an easy 400-600 Lexile level that targets a pronunciation feature (and is preceded by brief vocabulary lesson for full comprehension)

• Exercises to examine the IPA by looking closer at a section of the reading

• A contextualized dialogue that extends the content in dialog form, including follow-up discussion prompts

• An IPA script for feedback to pinpoint places where students should focus their practice

• Homework exercises to accompany existing YouTube videos from Rachel's English to reinforce lessons

PCC Instructors: I have the homework exercises (videos + comprehension questions) available in D2L format. If you are interested in them, please ask me.

This project was funded in part by a grant from Open Oregon Educational Resources.

PCC Instructors: Use file number 24527 when placing an order for the student edition at the bookstore.