I'm delighted to be presenting at TESOL Spain this year on the topic of pronunciation. This year, we'll be looking at individual sounds and things we and our students can do with them, including experimenting and imagining, representing and exploring, and playing and communicating.
(pdf of slides below) Proverbial wisdom tells us that if you give someone a fish, they can eat for a day, but if you teach someone to fish, they can eat for a lifetime. It’s a message about the long-term value of learning new skills and becoming independent. A similar thing could be said about pronunciation and dictionaries.
Authentic Listening Resource Pack (Delta Publishing, Jan 2015) provides an invaluable bank of selected audio and video material offering authentic listening practice, essential in developing students’ listening skills in preparation for being exposed to “real” English.
Think you heard it all? Think again! Expert listeners don't hear it all. They hear what's needed and disregard the 'noise'. But L2 listeners have to learn what counts as 'noise' in the target language. It’s not the ‘difficult’ words that present the biggest problem; it’s the ‘easy’ ones that are pronounced in unexpected ways.
Do you use the phonemic script in teaching? If you say, "It depends", what does it depend on? What are the pros and cons of the IPA? What kind of students does it help, and how does it help them? These are some of the issues broached in this paper.
Follow the link to see my review of Adam Brown's Pronunciation and Phonetics in the ELT Journal. (I'm sorry to say that this item is now in the membership section of the ELTJ but you can read more in the Articles section.)
This is a fun rap activity for young learners, focusing on the vocabulary of odd jobs which kids might do. It will help them to retain vocabulary, practice pronunciation, and get a bit of movement into the classroom.
Spoiler alert! Read no further if you´re going to attend this talk and rather like surprises! In this talk, we will take a playful approach to the teaching of pronunciation. We will see how the playfulness may lie one the one hand in the materials we use, as in the case of word-play, rhymes, chants and so on, and on the other hand, in the tasks we set up, as in the case of games and puzzles.
