How can I break English L2 pronunciation habits? [closed]

I keep making attempts to help L2 English learners break their strange pronunciation habits with tools like phonetic charts, but it seems like they just relapse. One of the big issues I deal with with L2 English learners in Japan is that they finish words with "o". For example, instead of saying, "Can you get me that?" They say, "Can you geto me thato?" They're trying to enunciate.

I have a controversial way of teaching pronunciation that ends with consonants that seems to be effective, but people just relapse into the behavior of enunciating with the added o. One of my regular students often uses count pronouns with non-count words and says, 'It's a style of English speaking. So, it's okay.'

Let's look at a specific example: walk vs. work. If you have people sound out 'werk' and 'wok', they sound spot-on. Unfortunately, after about 5 minutes, they're right back to saying "WAHELK" and "WHORLK", which just sounds terrible.

How can I solidify their pronunciation?

Solution 1:

I have had a similar problem when I was teaching German in Japan.

If the students are old enough you can explain to them that the phonetic pool of English is totally different from the one they have in Japanese, so they need to learn how to pronounce their words from scratch.

I spent about an hour teaching my student how to pronounce a word he never got right before and when it finally worked, he was really happy - also because he was instantly able to pronounce similar words correctly.

Another situation I had was when a student was able to produce the right sound already when combined with other vowels:

ich ("I" in German) echt ("genuine", "true")

acht ("eight") <--- my student always pronounced the "ch" as "h" here even though he got it right in the other cases.

So I made him say those words in a row "ich, echt, acht" to correct the "acht".

I realize this is pretty close to logpedics and speech therapy, but it does work in practise given a student who is intrinsically motivated to learn a language.

Solution 2:

I have a trick I use when learning another language: I speak my language (English) with a strong accent of the target language. That gets me into the feel, rhythm, where in the mouth I am making sounds, etc. Then I cut straight over to the target language keeping that feel.

I've been told by native speakers of all sorts of languages that I say words exactly like a native - with absolutely no detectable accent. Maybe you could try that.