LAHORE: The Dawn in Education Spelling Bee Phonetics Workshop educated some 240 teachers from more than 100 schools across Punjab about the usage of phonetics and the methods to teach students pronunciation during the two-day sessions which concluded at the Oxford University Press auditorium on Wednesday.

Azka Khan, who is training schoolteachers about phonetics at the Dawn in Education Spelling Bee Phonetics Workshop for the past three years, said she was continuously changing her workshop contents to give something new to the participants. This time, she said, she emphasised more on methods for pronunciation teaching for children and even helped teachers practice the newly learnt methods.

Earlier, she said, the phonetics workshops were more focused on teaching pronunciation to the students, who were preparing for the Dawn Spelling Bee competitions. Now the training was more focused on educating teachers to introduce phonetics to all of their students in respective schools.

She stressed that the phonetics must be taught to students and that too in their formative years in schools. She said the purpose of teaching phonetics was to ensure that those reading or speaking English should do it with perfection.

Lala Rukh, who is teaching at Jadeed Dastgeer Ideal High School, Gujranwala, told Dawn that learning phonetics was immensely important for teachers to improve the quality of education being imparted. She regretted that even most teachers were not able to pronounce words in a correct way and the rot continued to travel in the younger generations.

She also expressed her disappointment that even teachers were reluctant to learn phonetics considering using the correct pronunciation a taboo. She said even children in Gujranwala schools were not ready to participate in the Dawn’s Spelling Bee competitions but the change had started dawning.

Ms Lala Rukh said it was imperative for teachers to learn phonetics and teach their students in a right way. She said this workshop had given her a lot to improve as it was more of practice than theory. She hoped that she would be training her students in pronouncing words in better manner.

Another workshop participant, Imran Asghar from the Beaconhouse School System said the workshop had helped him refresh his phonetics knowledge.

He said the phonetics had become a science and should be taken seriously in order to impart quality education.

He said the teacher, who knew phonetics well, could help his students use dictionaries in a proper manner and learning correct pronunciation of words, which were generally being spoken in a wrong way.

He, however, suggested the use of more audio-visuals aids at the workshop.