Blog posts in August 2012

Here we've got ideas, observations on ELT, including Mark's Pronunciation Blog and loads of conference and speaker reports...

Dangerous dictation no.5

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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".

Dangerous Dictation no.3

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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.

Review: 13th BRAZ-TESOL National Convention "Proud to be"

Braz-tesol - hancockmcdonald.com/taxonomy/term/124/feed

BRAZ-TESOL holds a national conference every two years, and in July 2012, the event was held in Rio de Janeiro. It was truly a national event, with delegates coming from all over the country - and it's a big country, with some internal flights being several hours long.
LOCATION

Mark in Sweden

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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.

TESOL France

Event date: 
Saturday, November 17, 2012 - 14:00 to 16:45
Blog - hancockmcdonald.com/blog/130
We are presenting at TESOL France on Nov 17. Mark will speak at 14:00 on receptive pronunciation, Annie at 16:45 on authentic listening.