ELT thoughts, news and updates

TESOL Spain 2017 finished up with a compelling plenary from Silvana Richardson on native-speakerism and bias in ELT. She covered the topic from many angles, but out of all of them, I would just like to focus on one – the use of the phrase “native-speaker teachers” as a pull-factor in advertising language courses. Why has this come to be seen as a good thing - if indeed it has been?

"My sister went out with a long jumper". Here's a claim with two meanings, and reading it, you'd never be sure which was intended. But hearing it would clarify things, because the speaker has a way of communicating the intended meaning. It's the vocal effort known as 'stress'. "Long jumper" (athlete) is two words acting as a single lexical item.

Following last weeks post featuring a box set on the price/prize minimal pair, here's a box set on the bean/bin distinction. Again, one person is the speaker and says one of the phrases. His/her partner is the listener and says which they understood - A, B, C or D.

This pair of sentences could almost be phrasal homophones (oronyms), except for the differences in punctuation. They play with the fact that the sound bite 'call Dan' is identical to the sound bite 'called Anne'. There are also two meanings of 'called' (to phone or shout out to someone or to be named), which make the pair of sentences rather confusing!

There is something missing at the heart of the listening component in most ELT course materials. They fail to dig deep into the actual raw material of the skill – what Richard Cauldwell calls the ‘sound substance’.

Happy to see a review of our website in IATEFL Voices Issue 253, by Jennifer St.John of the University of Ottawa. Here are a few excerpts

Sixth in the series Accent through the keyhole. Scroll down for the mp3 podcast version.

Why are you illustrating this post with a picture of a mouthless face?

Fancy an accent tattoo? Fourth in the series Accent Through the Keyhole. Scroll down for the mp3 podcast download.

Speech sounds are just neutral, aren’t they? So how can there be a ‘bad boy’?

This is the second in the blog/podcast series Accent Through the Keyhole: small views of big pictures. Scroll down for the mp3 podcast.