• Tongue-twisters are excellent pronunciation activities as they usually focus on a particular sound or sounds. At the tongue-twister website you can find examples in any language you care to mention (http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/index.htm).
  
  
• Short poems, usually humorous ones, can often be found that perform the same function. See, for example, Le Pelican below. Use texts like these for short fillers, five-minute activities to revive a flagging group.
  
  

  Material for a pronunciation activity Le Pelican, par Robert Desnos

  Le capitaine Jonathan, Etant âgé de dix huit ans, Capture un jour un pélican Dans une île d'extrême orient. Le pélican de Jonathan, Au matin, pond un oeuf tout blanc Et il en sort un pélican Lui ressemblant étonnament. Et ce deuxième pélican Pond, à son tour, un oeuf tout blanc D'où il sort, inévitablement Un autre qui en fait autant. Cela peut durer pendant très longtemps Si l'on ne fait pas d'omelette avant.

  
  
  
• For French tutors, there is a series of rhymes which sound like English nursery rhymes. A small suspension of disbelief is required, since the French has been written to make sense in its own right as well as approximate the English sounds, so that some bits leave a little to be desired ('All the Kings', in the following, for example). On the whole they are fairly recognizable, but only if read with the correct pronunciation, so are useful for reinforcing the rules. What follows below is Humpty Dumpty - if the first line doesn't quite work, it's because the student hasn't noticed that 'Halles' has an aspirate 'h', so that there should be no liaison with the preceding 'aux':
  
  

  Un petit d'un petit s'étonne aux Halles Un petit d'un petit a degrés te fallent. En eau de qui ne sort cesse, en eau de qui ne se mène, Qu'un peut un petit d'un petit tout gué de Reguennes.

  
  For the full collection of Mots d'heures: gousses, rames (ie Mother Goose Rhymes), see D'Antin (1967).

Since improving students' pronunciation also involves training the ear, the following exercises will also be useful:

• Dictation - short passages, either direct from the tutor or from a cassette, preferrably focused upon a particular sound or pair of sounds.
• Word bingo - a listening activity to encourage recognition of different sounds. Use words that students confuse, or experience difficulties with. An example in French might be to reinforce the presence or absence of a terminal -e (indépendant, indépendante), or words that are close in pronunciation (lent / long). To render the feedback more immediate, after a pause to allow students to make their decision, the word pronounced could be written on the board for verification.

For further reading on pronunciation activities, see Ur (1991: 46-59) and Nunan (1991: 100-115) and Brown (2001: 283-85).