[DaveESL]

Hi folks,

I've just started teaching English for tourism classes at a university in China. I've got 7 years of experience teaching English, but I've only been teaching at this school for a few weeks. Before now, I'd never taught such large classes (50 or so students).

One of the things that I'd like to work on with my students is pronunciation. So far, I've come up with a few things - s / z, the two THs, the sound in pleasure vs. SH, r, and sentence level intonation. In the past, when I was teaching in Taiwan, I gave the students one on one attention when working on this type of thing. But my classes were small, only 8 or 10 students. Here, though, with 1:30 per week and 50 students, there's no way I can do that.

I'm wondering if you folks have any ideas about how to best teach and check pronunciation in large classes. Obviously, I can have them parrot stuff, but I won't be able to hear individual students. Plus, I'm not sure how effective that is. I think it works for sentence level intonation, but for smaller things I don't know if they'll really get it.

Anyways, any suggestions would be appreciated.

Take care,
Dave