Some Thoughts about Teaching Phonetics

My classmate brought up a good point about teaching L2 in different context. That was actually I was going to talk about here. While, the first thing I want to address my opinions here is about teaching phonetics.

I don't know why that learning or teaching phonetics sounded pretty boring to me, unless someone really enjoys how funny to see others try to produce some sounds. It is not hard to produce those easy one, but as for those tough ones, I was thinking how could we EFL/ESL teachers help our learners to get it? It is true that we can definitely teach them by demonstrating, by imitating, by drilled exercise. However, I don't think there is more that we can do. The same as we teach vocabularies, grammars, it is very important to teach the sounds in a context. Therefore, we could learn the sounds in words, in sentences, in texts. Doing minimal pairs is one kind of exercise students could do. Teachers can design some other controlled, guided and communicative practice as well. When I was a students, the communicative exercise is what we missed. Actually, this kind of practice can be a part that our students really enjoy doing it.

As for teaching English language in ESL and EFL contexts, there is a huge difference. There is possbility that both EFL and ESL teachers learned the same L2 as students do. Take myself as an example, if I go back to teach in China again, my Chinese linguistic knowledge and English linguistic knowledge can help me undstand learning English as a foreign language in a better way. My personal learning experience could be anothe asset to my teaching. However, ESL teacher may confront bigger challenges, since the student group could be more diverse. Students' different language and cultural background may "push" ESL teachers to learn linguistic knowledge about some languages. It can be a good opportunity to learn, but it can also make it more difficult when trying to find out how we can best help these students.