4 ways to improve your students' intelligibility

A woman and a man talking together

Intelligibility is the art of being understood by others. Many students think they need to speak a language flawlessly and with a native-like accent to make themselves clear, but this is not quite true.

While there is a correlation between proficiency and intelligibility, even students of lower general proficiency are capable of expressing what they mean, in a way that the listener understands, if they are using good intelligibility practices.

Being understandable in a second language is often extremely important in work environments, especially as the world becomes more connected and job markets more competitive.

Intelligibility is a vital aspect of communication but it is not exactly a skill in itself. Instead, it is a combination of fluency, pronunciation, and managing your speed of speech. To reflect how important this is for language learners when studying, traveling or at work, we use an Intelligibility Index as part of our Versant English Test scoring.

This index is based on factors affecting how understandable speech is to fluent English speakers. These include things like speed, clarity, pronunciation and fluency. Ranging from 1 (low) to 5 (high), the Intelligibility Index shows how intelligible someone’s speech in English is likely to be in a real-world situation.

Let’s go into some activities and exercises you can try in class to help your students improve their intelligibility with their English and speaking skills.

Ways to improve your students' Intelligability
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How can we help our students improve their intelligibility?

There are a number of factors that influence a student’s spoken English. Here are some ways to start building it into your classes.

1. Record their speech

Making a recording can be a good way of getting a clear picture of someone’s current manner of speaking and understanding in what ways their clarity might be improved. You can do this using a smartphone or laptop computer in class or outside of it.

There are plenty of ways to encourage students to speak. Have them answer an open question; for example, ask them to talk for a minute about a topic they are passionate about or tell each other what they did at the weekend.

Listen to the recordings and help them analyze their speech. Identify parts with low levels of intelligibility. This may be related to their pronunciation, how fast they speak, the amount of hesitation, repetition, etc.

You could even take this further by asking another fluent English speaker to listen to the recording and give honest feedback about which parts they found difficult to understand.

Afterward, it’s important to explain why it was difficult to understand and what can be done to improve their intelligibility. The activity below may help.

2. Listening and shadowing

Listening is a vital part of intelligibility. After all, students have to be able to hear a word before they can say it. Listening also takes focus away from how words are written on the page.

This is key because speakers fluent in English tend to blend words together, so pronouncing each word perfectly in isolation is not a good goal. This kind of practice reinforces poor English pronunciation.

That’s where shadowing comes in.

Shadowing is a useful listen-and-repeat activity that students can use for speaking practice almost anywhere.

  • First, select some audio for your students. It should be under five minutes in length and only be based on the speech of a single proficient English speaker. For more advanced students,is a great starting point, have the student choose a topic they find interesting and are already familiar with.
  • Have students listen to the audio once quickly just to get used to how the speaker sounds. They should pay attention to the speaker’s rhythm, accent, and speaking pace. Students should be able to understand most of what is being said.

Shadowing involves trying to say the same words as the speaker at about the same time (or as fast as possible), for about 30 seconds at a time. Students can pause, try again, and even record and listen back to their own versions. Just like when you sing the words of a song you already know well, you are trying to match the speaker’s pronunciation and pace as best you can.

This will help your students focus on how fluent English speakers modulate speed, use intonation, and blend words together. By repeating what they hear, students can improve their intonation, connected speech and overall fluency.

3. Target the problem sound

This simple but fun activity will help your students focus on their individual problem sounds. It will also get them to listen to each other carefully.

Throughout the lesson, as you listen to your students speak, identify a number of words that reflect the pronunciation challenges your students face. Write the words on the board and group the words by phoneme, for example:

/i:/ Heat, Sheep
/ɪ/ Hit, Trip

Above, we can see an issue with the /i:/ and /ɪ/ sounds (the long and short “i”). Once you have enough words to work on, write a list of numbers on the board. Explain that each number has a corresponding word.

1 – Hit 4 – Hat 7 – Head

2 – Heat 5 – Heart 8 – Hood

3 – Hot 6 – Hurt 9 – Hid

As you can see in the above example, the words only differ by one phoneme (heat/hit, hot/hat, heart/hurt, etc.). This will make the exercise more challenging and useful for the students.

Next, identify the vowel sound in each word and write their phonemic symbols on the board.

Drill the sounds and the words until you are confident your students can repeat them successfully. There are a number of phonemic charts online, that can help you identify the phonemes and model the sounds for your students.

Then test the class by calling out a number and having them shout out the corresponding word. Then call out a word and get them to tell you the number. Deal with any problems that arise.

Put students into pairs. Have them read out their phone number only using the words in the list (note they can use a real number or invent one).

Their partner should listen and write down the number which corresponds with each word they hear. They should then swap roles and do the same again.

Finally, get students to check and see whether the number their partner wrote down is correct. Monitor and go back and drill any of the sounds with which students had the most problems.

4. Transcribe and drill new vocabulary

While problems with individual sounds may occasionally impede understanding, we should also focus on other aspects of pronunciation such as word stress, sentence stress and intonation.

Keep a note of any new vocabulary that comes up during your class. At the end of the lesson, take five minutes to review it with the students. Write each new word on the board and record the word stress using the oO method:

Use ‘o’ to highlight unstressed syllables and ‘O’ to highlight stressed syllables. For example, the stress is on the second syllable of the word “behavior”:

Be-hav-ior = oOo.

The stress is on the first syllable of the word “Saturday”:

Sat-ur-day = Ooo

This has the advantage of recording unstressed as well as stressed syllables. Next, drill this new vocabulary until your students get the hang of it.

To make drilling more interesting, you can also add an element of drama! Have students say the words while expressing different emotions. Ask them to secretly choose an emotion (angry/happy/sad/excited), then say the word and have the other students guess it.

You can also drill whole phrases or even sentences. Backchain drilling is an excellent way to do this and build confidence in lower-level English learners. It involves breaking phrases into sections and having students repeat them after you, from the end of the phrase to the beginning, in this way:

“the test”
“pass the test”
“I’m going to pass the test"

As well as individual sounds and word stress, back chaining also allows you to help students with their intonation and you can also use it to introduce strong and weak forms. Working on multiword expressions and longer phrases with your students will also be helpful.

How is intelligibility scored in the Versant English Test?

Employers, schools and organizations use theVersant English Testto assess an individual’s level of English. It covers the two skills of listening and speaking and also includes an Intelligibility Index rating alongside the GSE, Versant and CEFR scores.

This allows students, teachers and employers to see how easily others can understand the candidate.

The following list shows how the index is scored:

  • Intelligability Rating 5 - Excellent-The candidate can be understood effortlessly by most listeners.
  • Intelligability Rating 4 - Good-Listeners may require a little effort at times to understand some of the candidate's speech.
  • Intelligability Rating 3 - Moderate- Listeners may require some effort to understand the candidate's speech, and some may not be fully intelligible.
  • Intelligability Rating 2 - Low- Listeners may require considerable effort to try to understand the candidate's speech. Despite the effort, it may still be mostly unintelligible.
  • Intelligability Rating 1 - Very Low-Listeners may find it difficult to understand most of the candidate's speech.

This scoring rubric offers a way to assess your students’ intelligibility based on the method used in the Versant English Test.

By giving them lots of support and pronunciation practice and nurturing their confidence to speak without worrying too much about making mistakes, you can help them to improve their clarity over time, allowing them to communicate in clear, understandable spoken English.

Learn more about Versant

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    Educating young learners: The importance of developing fine motor skills

    Por Hawys Morgan
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    Teachers of young learners will be familiar with the importance of developing children’s fine motor skills. Building muscle strength, hand-eye coordination, and control are essential parts of students’ development during their early years.

    A holistic approach to education

    For young learners, their education is frequently holistic. A single game or activity might develop their speaking and listening skills, mathematical knowledge, social interaction, artistic development as well as motor skills. In the same way, improving fine motor skills can form a natural part of students’ English classes and can have the following benefits:

    • Builds concentration and self-esteem
    • Actively engages students in their learning
    • Develops the ability to switch between physical and mental activities
    • Improves social development and autonomy

    Below are some simple ways you can develop fine motor skills in your classroom.

    Building muscle strength

    Holding a pen for prolonged periods requires strong hand, wrist and arm muscles. If you’ve ever had to sit long hand-written exams, you will be familiar with tired and aching hand muscles.

    It is important that students develop their muscle strength so they have the stamina and control needed for writing. Kneading and rolling play dough is a fun way to build these muscles. Then, children can use their playdough creations to role-play scenarios such as having a picnic or visiting a farm. They could even model it into letter shapes.

    When singing songs or telling stories to young learners, teachers often incorporate actions to reinforce meaning. This is another opportunity to build those muscles. Children could also create shadow puppets with their hands to act out stories.

    Craft activities that involve scissors and gluing also help improve stamina and hand-eye coordination.

    Mark making

    Mark making is an important step in a child’s development, encouraging creativity and coordination.

    Try giving your students the opportunity to explore different mediums of mark making. For example, they could draw marks in trays of sand, jello, shaving foam, flour or rice. Talk to them about their sensory experience (Is it cold? Do you like it? What color is it?). They could start making marks with their whole hands and then, as their coordination improves, use an index finger. Then, they can start using a stick to make marks.

    As their fine motor skills develop, try using magic markers, chunky crayons and egg chalks to make large marks. Egg-shaped chalks are easier for young children to grip. Each straight line, wavy line and circle is another step on the road to learning how to write.

    Pincer grip

    As children move on from general mark making, it is important to establish a correct grip when using a writing tool. This is especially important if you expect your students to go on to use a cursive style of handwriting in the future.

    The pincer grip is when we hold something with our index finger and thumb. Peeling off and placing stickers, sorting building blocks and threading beads use this grip and provide opportunities for practicing colors, numbers, vocabulary and prepositions of place. Doing up buttons or zips uses this grasp too.

    While it may be second nature for adults, for children, this grip requires precise control of the small muscles in their hands, wrists and fingers. Challenge students to pick up items with large blunt tweezers or chopsticks and work on their English at the same time (What have you got? I have a car. It’s small.).

    Tripod grip

    The next stage of development for most children is the tripod grip. It uses three fingers: the thumb, index and middle fingers. It enables children to keep their wrist steady so they can make small, precise pencil movements.

    Some children find using a rubber pencil grip, or simply wrapping an elastic band or lump of playdough around the base of the pencil helps them maintain this grip.

    At this stage, students will be learning to hold and use writing tools such as pencils, crayons, markers, chalks and paintbrushes.

    Prewriting activities

    Prewriting activities offer more controlled fine motor skills practice. The usual progression is to start with straight lines, zig-zags, curved lines and diagonal lines. Then move on to tracing over circles and u-shapes. This is all essential preparation for writing letters and words.

    English courses for young learners are full of mazes, dot-to-dot, tracing and matching activities, all of which combine prewriting with learning English.

    When it comes to writing letters, it can be helpful if students begin by drawing the letter shape in the air or in sand. They then trace the letter shape with an index finger, before finally tracing over the letter with a pencil.

    Other writing systems

    When teaching students who use a different writing system in L1, establishing fine motor skills routines can make all the difference to students’ writing.

    It can be helpful to work on left-to-right orientation. For example, before they sit down to write, give students scarves to move from left to right in the air. These students will benefit from pre-writing activities that work on left-to-right, top-to-bottom patterns.

    Social development

    Doing up buttons, zips, and laces, turning on taps, cutting up food and opening boxes – all of these things improve students’ fine motor skills. They also promote autonomy and social development by helping students learn essential everyday life skills

    This has an added advantage for the teacher. The less time you have to spend helping students with these tasks, the more time you will have to work on other areas of their development. Not only that, it is also motivating for students to have that ‘I can do it all by myself!’ feeling.

    Students will be far better prepared to pick up a pen or pencil if they have developed strength, dexterity and stamina in their hands, wrists and arms. This will leave them free to concentrate on the language element of their classroom task, rather than the physical challenge it presents.

    AboutEnglish Code

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    Focusing on project work and STEAM learning, children develop fine motor skills while learning how to collaborate and solve problems with their peers. Core functional language is at the forefront, giving students the vocabulary and tools they need to become confident speakers of English inside and outside the classroom.

  • A woman gesturing to her mouth in a playroom with a child copying the gesture

    Educating young learners: Making phonics fun

    Por Hawys Morgan

    For many young learners, reading and writing can be one of the most challenging steps in their English learning journey. Even fluent English speakers often find it difficult to understand the connection between how English is pronounced and how it is written.

    Let’s explore how phonics can be a valuable and fun tool to help students and teachers understand this connection.

    What is phonics?

    Phonics is a method of teaching learners how to read by making the connection between sounds and letters. There are around 44 different sounds used in English, and around 120 different ways of writing them down.

    Children learn to identify and say individual sounds (phonemes) and what letter or groups of letters can be used to write that sound down (graphemes). This helps children to read and spell words. For example, the /k/ sound is frequently written using these letters:

    • k as in kite
    • c as in cat
    • ck as in back

    When children learn to read using phonics, the sounds are read out in isolation, for example, b-a-ck. Then they are blended together to form the whole word: back.

    How to teach phonics

    Other methods of learning how to read and spell rely on students memorizing every new word they encounter – that’s potentially thousands of new words! On the other hand, phonics gives students the tools and confidence to read and spell unfamiliar words autonomously. If they know the sounds, they can read the word.

    Simply drilling sounds and letters will quickly become dull for students, so here are some practical, fun phonics ideas you can try out in the classroom.

    1. Use music

    Music can create a positive atmosphere for teaching phonics, and it helps children to memorize sounds in a lively, enjoyable way. Furthermore, it can improve pronunciation and listening skills.

    • Use musical instruments or clap to help students break words into individual sounds.
    • Alternatively, use ‘robot talk’ – say the words in a robotic way, breaking up the words into their component sounds, for example ‘r-e-d’.
    • Tongue twisters are useful for working on the initial sounds in words. Try creating tongue twisters using known vocabulary and students’ names, e.g. Sara sings in the sun.
    • Many ELT courses provide phonics songs that practice new sounds. However, you can also adapt well-known songs to teach phonics.

    Example song:

    Clap your hands and turn around!

    Put your hands up!
    Put your hands down.
    Clap your hands
    And turn around!

    Put your head up!
    Put your head down!
    Clap your hands
    And turn around.

    Put your leg up!
    Put your leg down!
    Clap your hands
    And turn around.

    2. Move your body

    Learning through movement comes naturally to many young learners and can be a dynamic part of your phonics routine. Incorporating movement into your lessons can motivate students and help them retain the sounds and letters.

    • Add an accompanying action when you present a new phonics sound and its corresponding letter/s. For example, say, ‘S, s, s, snake’ and make a snaking movement with your arm. The action becomes a visual prompt, so students call out ‘S!’ whenever you do the action.
    • Air drawing can be great fun. Have students trace the shape of letters in the air with a finger while repeating the corresponding sound. This is also good pre-writing practice.
    • You can even challenge students to work alone or in pairs to make letter shapes with their whole bodies!

    3. Make phonics tactile

    To really embed the connection between the shape of the letters and the sounds they represent, get children to use their hands to feel the shape of the letters while they repeat the sounds.

    These tactile phonics activities have the added advantage of working on fine motor skills, which in turn will improve students’ handwriting.

    • Show students how to trace the shape of the letter in a tray of sand while repeating the sound. Alternatively, try tracing the letter shape in shaving foam.
    • Try modeling the letter shapes out of playdough or a piece of string.
    • A fun pair-work game involves one student silently drawing a letter on their partner’s back. Their partner must guess the letter and say the sound.

    4. Be creative

    There are wonderful, creative ways you can explore phonics with your students. For younger students who don’t yet have the fine motor skills to write letter shapes, using arts and crafts can be an enjoyable way to reinforce the link between the letter/s and the sound.

    • They could make letter shapes from dried pasta or use junk modeling.
    • Have your students decorate letter shapes by painting, coloring, or collaging. This will help them memorize the shapes. Encourage them to repeat the sounds as they do this, or play a phonics rhyme in the background so the association between the sound and letter/s is constantly reinforced.

    Create class displays for different sounds using a variety of pictures and objects starting with that sound. Use them for revision and classroom games. Try splitting the class into teams and then calling out a sound, or a word starting with that sound. The first team to touch the display with the matching letter/s wins a point.

    5. Play games

    Many popular ELT games can be adapted to teach phonics. Games are a great way to bring phonics to life and to give young learners the confidence to produce the sounds themselves.

    • Play ‘Whispers’. Students sitting in a circle whisper a sound rather than a word to the child next to them until it reaches the end of the circle. The last child says the sound aloud, or points to the letters that correspond to that sound.
    • Get children to create their own sets of cards with sounds and pictures on them. These can be used to play card games like snap and pairs.
    • Other games such as i-spy, board rush games, bingo and lucky dip, can be easily adapted to teach phonics.

    Whether you dedicate a whole lesson or just five minutes of your lesson to phonics, make sure to have fun!