A letter to the teachers of English: 54Some useful activities for the vacation (2) [Archives:2004/760/Education]

Dr..M.N.K.Bose ([email protected])
Associate Professor of English,
Faculty of Arts, Ibb.
Dear Fellow teachers,
Did you read my last letter, in which I have suggested preparing a glossary for the Pupil's Book you are teaching? I hope you saw the reason behind my suggestion and start the planning of the work during the vacation. You are welcome to contact me if you want any more help in this regard.
The other activity for the vacation, which is equally useful to you and your learners, is the preparation of a phonetic dictionary for your Pupil's Book. This is a bit more difficult than the first one I have suggested in my last letter and needs a bit more care and effort. The benefit you are going to get is, no doubt, more and the work will be interesting too.
Why a phonetic dictionary? In order to make your classroom English more sophisticated and to enable your learners to improve their pronunciation skills. Of course, any good dictionary has phonetic transcription of each word entered in it, but a phonetic dictionary for your Pupil's Book is an exclusive list of words selected from it and their phonetic transcription, which will make it easier for you to pronounce the words you deal with in your classes.
How to prepare a phonetic dictionary? Write down the important words from each unit in your Pupil's Book in a notebook and with a help of a good dictionary, copy down the phonetic transcription of each word next to it. In each unit, you will need to write about 10 to 15 words, and on the whole, about 100 words for a book. The effort spent on this work will be worthy considering the advantages it has; your pronunciation will improve marvelously, because you are going to pronounce each of the key words accurately with the help of your phonetic dictionary. If you have this with you, you needn't carry a dictionary with you to the class. Moreover, you can help your colleagues, if you want, with copies of this dictionary.
Some of you who prepare your lesson plans carefully may be writing the transcription of the key words in each lesson in your lesson plans. If you put them together, your dictionary is ready. The additional benefit for you is that you will improve your spoken English when you have the habit of referring to a dictionary for the transcription.
If two or three of you teach the different sections of the same class, you can prepare the dictionary jointly, each one taking one or two units and putting them together at the end. The word lists given at the end of the Workbooks will be of great help in this regard, as you can select the words from these lists.
Think of the advantages you are going to get out of this activity and start planning the work right now. You are welcome to contact me, if you want any more help in this regard. Good luck.
Yours fraternally,
Dr.M.N.K.Bose.
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