Pronunciation hebrew to english is one of the most time-consuming tasks not only for the student, but also for the teacher. And I must say that this task is often also very thankless: the ratio of time and effort, on the one hand, and the result, on the other, almost equally depend mainly on the talent of both participants in the process. Of course, this can be said about pedagogy in general, but in some issues this topic is especially acute. A good phonetic teacher in our time cannot be found with fire during the day, but adult students with excellent imitating abilities do not lie on the road either.

There are three main methods of working on pronunciation. Everything else is private techniques, which are variations and combinations of these three.

The first of the traditional ways of setting pronunciation is the articulatory approach. Within the framework of this approach, sounds that are the same as the native language and different are distinguished, studying each of them separately. At the same time, the formation of auditory and articulatory skills is separated. Sounds are worked out in the system of phonetic exercises, when the necessary sound is pronounced both by itself and in various combinations with other sounds.

The second is the acoustic approach. In this case, the emphasis is on imitation of the sounds of listening speech. There is no isolated work with sounds, the possibility of mastering phonetics from speech models and speech flow is assumed. Directly on pronunciation, attention is usually not focused.

And the third is a differentiated approach, which is close to the articulatory approach, but differs from it in the use of audio recordings (respectively, there is a comprehensive work with hearing and speaking), including adapted ones: for example, when the teacher deliberately pronounces words and expressions slowly, the so-called. didactic speech.

From the experience of school and university education, most of us are mostly familiar with the third method, and the second method is usually practiced in communicative courses.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of these methods.

In the first case, with the articulatory approach, three potential problems immediately attract attention, which in practice usually turn into real ones. Firstly, an integral part of the phonetic spectrum of tasks is completely ignored – intonation, rhythm, melody of speech. In fact, the pronunciation is artificially separated from the general system of speaking. Secondly, the division also occurs from the neuropsychological side, since work with auditory skills is excluded. While we have already found out that the human auditory-speech system is purely physiologically indivisible into a separate auditory and separate speech system. And thirdly, as many linguists rightly point out, there are no completely identical phonemes (speech sounds) in different languages, they all differ in different languages. Setting the teaching on “the same” and “other” phonemes will eventually serve the student in disservice: no matter how much he practices “other”, the sound of “the same” will cut down all his efforts to develop the correct pronunciation.

The strength of the articulatory method lies in working with individual sounds and training them in various combinations, for which specially selected words, phrases, tongue twisters and texts are used. Instead of technical devices, a mirror is often used, which allows the student to observe his own facial expressions and articulation when pronouncing individual sounds or words after the teacher demonstrates and explains the mechanism of their occurrence.

The acoustic approach is good for its naturalness, since according to this principle, a person masters his native speech. However, there are pitfalls here as well. First: success depends on how well the student has natural good phonemic data – the ability to hear and imitate speech, or the patience to develop these abilities, which are naturally inherent in every person, just the peak of their activity takes place in childhood. And the second “pebble”: if no one corrects the student, he should periodically record himself, learning to hear his own speech in a foreign language.

As mentioned above, the differentiated method spun off from the articulatory one, adding technical (language-based) means and didactic speech to it. Thus, he got rid of some of the shortcomings of the articulatory method, however, not all of them. But in order not to repeat ourselves, let’s pay attention to the specific feature of the differentiated method – didactic speech. The need for slow-motion recordings, also prepared by non-native speakers, raises some doubts when it comes to working with adult learners. What is effective for a child of one age or another is usually not effective for adults in practice, because the neuropsychological mechanisms for generating speech in an adult work in a slightly different way. Teaching an adult to slow speech often gives rise to problems at the next stage, when it is necessary to switch to a normal speech rate: difficulties in this case usually arise not with speaking, but with the perception and understanding of speech by ear. This problem just demonstrates the principle of the coordinated operation of the auditory-speech system, which is not sufficiently taken into account by this method.