A sample lesson plan

A Song: Henry VIII

The spelling is as faithful a transcription of the Cockney dialect as I could manage. The sections underlined show the liaisons. Tell students that we run all our words together and when we have to run two vowel sounds together, we always add either a "Y" or a "W". Teach them the song with a strong Cockney dialect and get them to see the running together of the different sounds and the adding of the Y's and W's.

One piece of advice: save the choral shouting out of " 'Ennery" in Line 5 and "No Sam" in Line 6 for later. Introduced to early, this just sidetracks them.

A pedagogical explanation:

The purpose of this is neither to get them to talk like Cockneys nor to widen their range of aural comprehension - although that could be a side effect. The real aim is to get them to produce sounds so foreign to them that they totally leave behind their mother tongue concept of how to make English sounds.

Once you get them out of their usual mother tongue speech patterns, they will naturally gravitate towards solid mid-Atlantic ways of pronouncing things. But the dialects they produce must be extreme ones; otherwise they will continue to hear BBC English and produce foreign sounds which are difficult for us to understand.

There is no correlation between what students think they sound like and what they really produce.