Phonetic WipeOut!
Going phonetically crazy at the most with a couple of my classes and here’s an idea for students to practise their pronunciation and vocabulary at the same time.
Tomorrow my B1 students are going to be looking at vocabulary to describe people. I’m going to give them a lot of new vocabulary written on slips of paper and after dividing the language into lexical sets (appearance, positive and negative adjectives for personality), I’m going to put them into three groups and give each a lexical set to play for. Then they’ll have to look at the Phonetic WipeOut board and correctly identify and pronounce a word for their group in order to win the square. The first team to get their five words, wins. There’s also a “red herring” square, child.
I’ve chosen phonemes which I know my students have problems with, as the activity is not only to familiarise them with the phonetic alphabet, but also to encourage them to use it in order to pronounce words correctly.
Nice one. I was looking for a B1 vocab revision just today. Let me know how it goes.
Thanks for stopping by, Alan. The activity worked well – there were words which they thought were different adjectives, such as /streɪt/ which they thought was strict. And other words which they recognised but pronounced incorrectly as they were thinking about the spelling rather than the phonetics: one student said /ˈmiːdjəm heɪt/ instead of /ˈmiːdjəm haɪt/. All in all, good fun.