Pronunciation blog posts

Richard Cauldwell on the jungle of connected speech

Wednesday - April 10th, 2013
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Event date: 
Wednesday, April 10, 2013 - 11:30
IATEFL-Liverpool - hancockmcdonald.com/taxonomy/term/159/feed

Richard Cauldwell is gradually developing a whole new set of words and images for conceptualizing connected speech, and his system is given power by his long experience in close analysis of natural, unscripted recordings. His principle claim is that unscripted speech radically departs from anything that the written form might lead us to expect.

  • Listening
  • Pronunciation

Robin Walker on technology in pronunciation teaching

Tuesday - March 12th, 2013
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
- hancockmcdonald.com/blog/archive/201303

Robin Walker (read our review of his latest book here) began by positing 3 stages in acquiring pronunciation: 1. the cognitive stage - becoming aware of a feature; 2. the associative stage - training yourself to be able to deal with the feature; 3.

  • Pronunciation

Mark Hancock at IATEFL Liverpool

Monday - November 26th, 2012
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Event date: 
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 (All day)
Blog - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/130

Mark Hancock: I will be presenting a workshop entitled "Pronunciation for listeners: making sense of connected speech" at the conference on the Tuesday. I'm also speaking at the pronunciation sig pre-conference event.

  • Listening
  • Pronunciation

Pronunciation in Coursebooks

Sunday - September 30th, 2012
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Blog - hancockmcdonald.com/blog

My impression is that coverage of pronunciation in current coursebooks is usually imbalanced in favour of individual sounds, to the detriment of syllables, connected speech and discourse.

  • Pronunciation

Dangerous dictation no.5

Tuesday - August 21st, 2012
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Pron-Puzzles - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/topic/pron-puzzles

What basic information question has been misunderstood in this picture? Answer = "What's your address?". Surprisingly, for many speakers, these two sentences are perfectly identical in sound. The S in "what's" and the Y in "your" combine to make an SH sound. This in turn joins the T in "What" to create the CH sound. That makes "Watch". The "Your" minus that first Y sound becomes "or".

  • Pronunciation

Dangerous Dictation no.3

Friday - August 10th, 2012
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Pron-Puzzles - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/topic/pron-puzzles
The sign should of course read "No dogs allowed". But since what's actually on the sign is a perfect phrasal homophone, a transcriber is perfectly entitled to write it either way. Notice what this shows us about the pronunciation of "are" as nothing more than a schwa.
  • Pronunciation

Mark in Sweden

Saturday - August 4th, 2012
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Blog - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/67

Mark's talking about pronunciation as a listening skill at two events in Sweden in August, organized by the book distributor Utbildningsstaden. Details here.

  • Pronunciation

Dangerous Dictation n.2

Friday - June 22nd, 2012
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Pron-Puzzles - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/topic/pron-puzzles
Dangerous Dictations are puzzles which depend on word-boundary confusions. For example, 'Bow Tie' sounds exactly like 'Boat Eye', because you can't be sure whether the /t/ sound is the end of 'Boat' or the start of 'Tie'. This could lead to dictation errors. The puzzle for your students is to identify and explain the error.
  • Pronunciation

Dangerous Dictation n.1

Friday - June 22nd, 2012
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Pron-Puzzles - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/topic/pron-puzzles
Dangerous Dictations are puzzles which depend on word-boundary confusions. For example, 'The Great Ape' sounds exactly like 'The Grey Tape', because you can't be sure whether the /t/ sound is the end of 'Great' or the start of 'Tape'. This could lead to dictation errors. The puzzle for your students is to identify and explain the error.
  • Pronunciation

English Pronunciation in Use - New edition!

Wednesday - March 14th, 2012
Posted by: 
Mark Hancock
Event date: 
Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - 09:00
English Pronunciation in Use - new edition March 2012

New Edition of English Pronunciation in Use, out just last week! There's plenty that's new here, including a much clarified approach to tonic stress placement, and a section focusing on receptive pronunciation (ie, pronunciation for listening), including variation and accents.

  • Pronunciation

Pages

Subscribe to Blog