The clip you are about to watch comes from one of Jess’s lessons. Jess is a teacher in a Language Centre at a UK university and clips from her classes are also included in the section on reading. In this case, Jess is talking about the pronunciation of the word “variety”. In BBC English, this would be transcribed as /vəˈraiətI/.

One of the underlying issues here is how learners’ other language impact on their learning of English. In most varieties of Arabic, there is no direct equivalent of the English phoneme /v/. /v/ is produced by using the lips and the teeth. In phonetic terms it is a labio-dental sound. When someone whose first language is Arabic learns English, /v/ is often a problem and, before looking at the clip, you might like to consider what the nearest Arabic sound to the English /v/ is. While Arabic does not typically have labio-dental sounds it does have more glottal, pharyngeal and uvular sounds than English. Chapter 7 Pronunciation(Badger, 2018) provides more information about describing and teaching pronunciation.

1. Why did Jess decide to focus on the word “variety”? How did the learner in Jess’s class pronounce “variety”? Would this word be problematic for your learners?
2. What information does Jess provide about the word “variety”? Why does Jess talk about her own attempts to produce Arabic sounds? If you teach learners who speak language you do not speak, would you discuss your problems with pronouncing those languages with your learners? Why/why not?
3. The learner is aware of how his pronunciation is different from BBC English and Jess gives him some information about how to produce the sound “v”. How might you use minimal pairs to help the learner to hear the difference between /v/ and /b/ or /v/ and /w/? See section 7.4.1 in Badger (2018).
4. Some teachers like to use tongue twisters as guided practice for pronunciation. Would you use this tongue twister with your learners?
     Bob has a very big van and Viv has a violet boat. Bob’s van is a bit bigger than Viv’s boat but Viv’s boat is better than Bob’s van.

5. What activities might you use in class to help the learner used words containing the phoneme /v/ in a more communicative context?

Badger, R. 2018. Teaching and learning the English language: a problem solving approach. London: Bloomsbury.