Pronunciation blog posts

Delighted to announce the arrival of a new member of the PronPack family! Connected Speech for Listeners provides background tips plus a wealth of teaching ideas and materials for dealing in class with the pronunciation of natural spoken English. The main objective is to help learners improve their listening skills.

This new book outlines a complete approach and philosophy of pronunciation teaching, in the form of 50 very accessible two-page tips. More about it here, and a review of the book by Robin Walker here.

Our books PronPack 1-4 have been awarded a prize from the English Speaking Union in recognition of their contribution to teaching spoken English. The books won the runners up prize in the category of teaching resources. The prestigious ESU prizes are awarded every two years.

Take a look at a video of an English pronunciation lesson, with me using materials and techniques from my books PronPack 1-4 (http://pronpack.com/) I explain that there are four kinds of activities, which may be summed up as muscle, mind, meaning and memory.

Here's Gemma Archer at IATEFL Brighton (on the PronSIG day) explaining how she felt when, starting her teaching career, she was expected to teach pronunciation in a posh English accent. She was teaching in a Scottish environment and has a Scottish accent, so teaching RP just didn't make any sense. So she gave up on pronunciation altogether.

Here's a link to a seminar Mark Hancock did at the British Council about teaching individual phonemes

The PronPack Sound Chart isfeatured on the cover Modern English Teacher Volume 27 Issue 1, January 2018. Inside, there is my article on the hexagon vowel chart entitled 'Putting Vowels on the Map'. Plus, there is a review of PronPack by Brian Brennan in Ih Barcelona, including the following comments:

“Hancock’s approach is strikingly innovative”

Ebook
+ cheaper
+ integrated audio
+ quick to navigate to the page you want
+ good to have as your own personal copy
+ print the worksheets from pronpack.com

Last class, a South Korean student told me about his weekend visit to Liverpool. He said it wasn’t easy to understand the local way of speaking, and gave the example of the question word What? He demonstrated how this word had been said, with the final ‘t’ replaced with a silence, or glottal stop, so it sounds like wha’?