Speaking blog posts

To articulate or not to articulate, that is the question

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Blog - hancockmcdonald.com/blog

In speaking styles, there is a continuum between mumbling and rolling your ‘r’s –. What I mean by mumbling here is speaking with as little mouth movement as possible in order to minimize effort on the part of the speaker.

Bringing the corpus back to life? Reflections on McCarthy on spoken grammar

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Event date: 
Saturday, October 4, 2014 - 11:30
Conference Reports - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/topic/conference-reports-0

Mike McCarthy gave the opening plenary at English UK Academic (North) conference last Saturday (Oct 4 2014), revisiting the topic of the grammar of spoken English. Spoken language, he pointed out, is in no way an imperfect, poorly realized version of the written form.

Stephanie Williams on adverts to stimulate speaking

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 - hancockmcdonald.com/blog.xml/10

Stephanie began by pointing out why video adverts are a fabulous resource in the ELT classroom: they're short; adaptable to different levels; authentic; relevant to most student's worlds; offer visual support; context rooted and catchy and motivating by design. A compelling list of attributes.

David Bradshaw on getting them speaking

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 - hancockmcdonald.com/blog.xml/10

David Bradshaw explained how speaking is a very difficult skill to promote in secondary school classrooms, and how he used to dread it. He then went on to demonstrate a series of activities which he has found to work in that context, really motivating the students to want to talk, and incidentally providing excellent preparation for Cambridge exams.

Debbie West on presentation skills

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 - hancockmcdonald.com/blog.xml/10

Gillian Evans opened the session with a warm-up exercise of body movements to refresh us at the end of a long day.

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