Lesson One

To better facilitate students in digesting the contents of this corpus-based English pronunciation course, this lesson plan is designed to help students become familiar with basic concepts of corpus, corpus-aided pronunciation learning, and English sound system. To prepare students for the following tasks in analyzing their own pronunciation features, teacher will introduce English sound system (segmentals and suprasegmentals) to students and focus on the pronunciation features that are important to teach and learn. As this pronunciation course is corpus-based, three spoken corpora used in this course will be introduced to equip students with the tools to analyze and improve their own pronunciation. Teacher will also demonstrate how to use the spoken English corpus ‘Spoken English Corpus of Chinese and Non-Chinese Learners in Hong Kong’ in particular since this corpus will be used for speech analysis practice.

This is an important introductory lesson that will lay the foundation for later corpus-based activities. After completing this lesson, students will have a better understanding of corpus-based pronunciation learning, will know the most important features to learn in English pronunciation, and will be able to use corpus data to improve their own pronunciation.