IATEFL Pronsig's "Speak Out" magazine 50th Edition celebratory issue is just out, and what an amazing collection it is. Contrats to Robin Walker for getting it together! I'm very proud to have an article in it myself, entitled "A Map of Pronunciation Teaching". Here's the map and excerpts from the intro and conclusion of the article.
This workshop is part of the IATEFL pronSIG day, session 2.4 (14:05 - 14:50). Rhythm and sentence stress are vital in creating meaning, yet they can be daunting and confusing for both teachers and students.
For awareness of pronunciation features including sounds and spelling, and features of connected speech, for B1 upwards: put this poem on the board and ask students to read it and work out what it's all about. Here's what happened when I tried: they all looked totally blank. One or two asked for vocab items, like 'gee!', which I then explained.
In one-to-one pronunciation teaching, we must assess what the individual student needs and find the best way of providing it. We can’t use a pre-determined syllabus or ‘set-piece’ pronunciation materials. Instead, we need to be flexible enough to negotiate and adapt both syllabus and methods. For this, we need to keep three questions in mind:
Have fun in class and raise awareness of how pronunciation affects listening at word level and across words. Find the teacher's notes and worksheet pdf below, plus a video/karaoke of the song, and an audio-only mp3.
Watch the video for a brief explanation of this pronunciation point. Download the jpeg image. Ask your students to work in pairs and read it aloud. Explain that it is written wrongly and ask them to work out what it should say.
Thank you for coming to my talk on Pronunciation as a Listening Skill. As a follow up, I'd like to provide links to all the material mentioned in the session. First of all, the authentic listening about Facebook comes from Unit 50 of this book.
Ray Parker argued that, regarding stress-timing and rhythm, we have tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The notion that natural spoken English has a regular rhythm, he says, has been discredited by the research, but our response has been to abandon both that, and any attention to stress-timing.
