If you want students to practice their pronunciation and to have fun while doing it, try out some tongue-twisters. This is a great way to have students focus on their pronunciation without relying on repetition. It’s fun to make it into a game and see who can say it the fastest. Once students get more comfortable with the pronunciation they can begin to make their own tongue-twisters in the target language. This would be a great opportunity to see if students understand the sound-symbol relationship between letters, letter combinations, or characters. Very often as well, the content of the tongue-twister is a window into the culture.
Here are some tongue-twisters to get you started:
Rao k’ou ling (Mandarin)
Tongue-Twisters (English)
Virelangues (French)
Zungenbrecher (German)
Scioglilingua (Italian)
Hayakuchi Kotoba (Japanese)
Trava Linguas (Portuguese)
Trabalenguas (Spanish)