In a language where "What's your address?" can become a homophone of "Watch or a dress?", there's plenty of scope for misunderstanding, even for what you might call 'native listeners'. For learner listeners, the situation is many times more perilous. For them, listening can be like wandering in a surreal soundscape.
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 image is a minimal pair, squared - what I call a box set. One person says one of the phrases. The other has to listen and say A, B, C or D. The minimal pairs in this instance involve /s/ and /z/ - these are a pair of related consonants, the first unvoiced and the second, voiced.
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’.
One person's prestige accent is another person's speech impediment. Third in the series Accent through the keyhole. Scroll down for the mp3 podcast version.
This series of 8 podcasts / posts looks at key questions relating to accent and English teaching by focusing on specific instances and generalizing out from them. This page serves as a contents list for the series:
View 1: Either will do. In which we look at what's not important in pronunciation teaching.
ACCENT THROUGH THE KEYHOLE: small views of big pictures. This series of posts looks at key questions relating to accent and English teaching by focusing on specific instances and generalizing out from them. Check out the podcast too - it's at the bottom of the page...
Manchester in summer is not always something to write home about, but this summer was different. Norwich Institute of Language Education (NILE) offered their first ever pronunciation teaching course, and I was the tutor and course designer. It took place as part of NILE’s summer programme at their Manchester site.
ELT materials writing is a creative process, and the prospect of creating something from nothing on an empty white page can be quite daunting. But the materials writer has to do just that, and moreover, do it within very tight constraints. For instance, if you are writing a narrative for ELT purposes, it must not only be engaging as a narrative, but it must also be useful as a learning tool.
On the TESOL Spain website (click here), you can now see videos of various speakers from the 2016 conference in Vitoria, conducted by Gerard McLaughlin.
Friday, March 11, 2016 - 09:15 to Sunday, March 13, 2016 - 14:15
We're off to the north of Spain this weekend for the 39th annual TESOL Spain convention, which is taking place in Vitoria-Gasteiz. Mark will be presenting a complete pronunciation workout.