PronPack 2 Pronunciation Puzzles

Pronunciation Puzzles are challenging game-like activities which are fun to do in pairs or small groups but are equally effective for individual students. They include such puzzle types as mazes, sudoku, word searches and crosswords. The puzzles can benefit learners principally by raising awareness of patterns in the pronunciation of English such as how certain letter combinations are pronounced, where the stress falls in word families, or how words are joined together in connected speech. Although the activies are mainly concerned with awareness-raising they also provide productive rehearsal and practice for students, reading the words and phrases aloud while they work and when checking the answers as a class. What aspects of pronunciation are covered in PronPack 2? The puzzles at the beginning of the book focus on individual sounds. The later ones focus on features such as the grammatical endings -ed and -s, suffixes and word stress, tonic stress and connected speech. In addition, since all of the words and phrases in the puzzles appear in printed form, they serve to raise awareness of sound-spelling correspondences, and reinforce the insight that English spelling does not reflect pronunciation as closely as students often expect.