Pronunciation: ABC,s and how we say them.

My student (who is also my Spanish tutor) and I came up with this idea for practicing the pronunciation of the English alphabet in an intermediate level adult class. I bring in at least enough of the same newspaper for half the class. I have my students divide up in pairs. In my class it is possible and desirable to have each pair come from two different languages. They then do timed dictation, from any article we choose, one student with a newspaper dictating to a student without, ONE LETTER AT A TIME. Content is not necessarily important here, just the ability to pronounce and understand English letters. They say "space" between words. The punctuation should also be noted. I call time after 5 or 10 minutes and see who got the farthest without mistakes. Then they switch. I make a half-hearted attempt to make it a contest but my adult students don't seem to really care about competition. They're too busy working on their pronunciation, and sometimes too busy laughing, to care about winning. I've introduced this game by singing the ABC song with them a few times after writing all the letters on the board.--Submitted by Keith Cary and Yosu Vazquez