Why “Repeat After Me” Doesn't Improve Pronunciation
You’re reading out some expressions for the student to repeat after you. In your opinion, which of the following is the best way to do so?
- Your student repeats when you’re halfway through the sentence.
- Your student repeats immediately after you finish reading the sentence.
- Your student lets you finish the sentence, reflects on the pronunciation, and then reads it out loud.
If your student just wants to practice saying things, options 1 and 2 are fine. However, if a student wants to improve their pronunciation, option 3 is more ideal.
After all, we won’t improve by mindlessly repeating after what we hear. We only improve when we repeat after reflecting on what we’ve heard. Unfortunately, very few students do this.
So today, we’ll talk about how to get them to practice mindful repetition so their pronunciation actually improves.
Make Students (Actually) Listen
While we think students are listening to us, they often aren’t. Instead, they’re focused on reading the text in the lesson materials.
Reading (instead of listening) then leads to another problem. Because many English words aren’t spelled the way they’re pronounced, the spelling in the text will distract students from listening to your correct pronunciation.
The temptation to read and not listen is a result of the “McGurk Effect,” which says that our brains prioritize what we see over what we hear. This effect is very powerful, as demonstrated in the following video, which shows that we hear what we see … instead of what’s being said!
Funnily, even experts on the McGurk effect have trouble with it!
So one thing we can encourage our students to do is to close their eyes and listen closely to what we’re saying — before reading the words on the page. Or have them read your lips instead of the text. Either way, don’t let them get distracted.
Have Students First Repeat In Their Mind
A basketball player who successfully shoots a ball into the basket might ask themselves, “How did I do that? What did I do correctly?” They’ll reflect on their hand positioning or timing and then try to reproduce it.
In the same way, learners should also try to replay the sounds they heard, and reflect on it before trying to reproduce them. As a researcher put it, “if you cannot imagine yourself repeating a sentence in your head, you will not be able to produce it out loud.” So encourage your students to first repeat in their mind before repeating out loud.
We’ll want to exaggerate important features of the target word or expression to help students notice them and be able to replay them in their mind. For example, if you notice your student mispronouncing a consonant or vowel sound, repeat the word(s) again, emphasizing that sound.
Have Students Repeat After Themselves
Finally, it’s sometimes better to not have students repeat after us. For example, maybe you’ve repeated a word (e.g. “row”) many times, but your student still pronounces it “low.”
Your student most likely can’t hear the difference between the two sounds. After all, some sounds are very difficult, even for people who are otherwise really fluent! In these cases, just having the student repeat after you won’t help.
Instead, guide them towards the proper pronunciation using explanations of how to position their mouth, drawings, or gestures. (See our post on teaching R and L sounds for examples.) Then have them repeat after themselves to get used to it.
In other words, rather than “spoon-feeding” the sound to the student, we let them gradually develop their own model of the sound. This process of figuring out how to achieve the right pronunciation will help them better remember it in the long term.
As a famous pronunciation teacher put it , “The point is not for the teacher to keep making the sound and for the student to keep repeating it, because the student doesn't necessarily know what she or he is doing. [Instead, we should ask ourselves,] ‘How can I help the student arrive at the sound … and then use muscle memory to find and retrieve [it]?’”
📌 Takeaways
To sum up, here are three strategies to help students become more mindful of pronunciation during repetition exercises:
- Make sure students actually pay attention to your pronunciation by having them close their eyes or read your lips.
- Have students mentally repeat before they actually repeat out loud.
- Guide students toward the right pronunciation and then have them repeat after themselves.
Happy tutoring!
