Event date:
Saturday, October 5, 2019 - 11:00
Venue:
SATEFL 40th Anniversary Celebration
Location:
The Albert Hall, Dumbarton Road, Stirling, Scotland
What is to become of pronunciation teachng in these post-ELF times? Thanks for coming to this talk. The slides can be downloaded below. The pronunciation errors diagnosis game can be found here.
Saturday - September 7th, 2019
This chant is made up of five rhyming couplets, and it has an unusual density of TH-sounds (the hard TH in 'earth' and the soft TH in 'brother'. The hard TH is called ‘theta’, and for convenience, I’ll use that name to refer to both sounds.
Saturday - August 31st, 2019
This is a board game for use in teacher training. Players can use a dice and counter. They take turns to throw the dice and move. They should explain the pronunciation error in the sentence they land on, and match it with one of the causes in 1-5 at the top of the board.
Wednesday - August 28th, 2019
The image above is the answer key to a surprisingly tricky puzzle which requires learners to keep a clear distinction in mind between the spelling of words and the way they are pronounced.
Wednesday - August 14th, 2019
Project the image and do any or all of these activities:
Wednesday - May 8th, 2019
Publication:
English Teaching Professional, issue 22 May 2019
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional issue 22 May 2019
Pronunciation straddles two domains: it is part language – like grammar or vocabulary – and part skill – like speaking or listening. This unique position makes pronunciation teaching interestingly varied, and potentially very enjoyable too. It is so much more than the ‘listen-and-repeat’ stereotype that is sometimes attached to it, and can’t be reduced to one single thing in this way. In this article, I will suggest that we can, in fact, divide it into four general areas, and I will label these with a mnemonic of four words, each beginning with m: muscle, mind, meaning and memory.
Event date:
Saturday, May 11, 2019 - 10:30
Location:
Erasmushogeschool, Brussels
In this workshop, we will consider what counts as success in pronunciation, especially in the light of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). We will then try out some activities which I have found to be successful over 30 years of writing pronunciation materials, and discuss how these can be used in a way which enhances the learner’s communicative success.
Thursday - April 25th, 2019
Publication:
Humanising Language Teaching Apr 2019 - Year 21 - Issue 2
We sometimes dehumanize pronunciation in the way we talk about it. If a learner mispronounces a word, we might say, ‘It isn’t pronounced like that; it’s pronounced …’ (and then we model the ‘correct’ way). In the dictionary, there are transcriptions to tell us how words are pronounced. Talking about weak forms, we might say, ‘In these words, the vowel sound is reduced to a schwa’.
Monday - March 11th, 2019
PronPack is now available in Australia from Bookery. To celebrate, we have added Australia to our atlas of Air Traffic Control maps. Download it from here (Activity 3.1 new versions).
Event date:
Tuesday, April 2, 2019 - 14:45
Venue:
IATEFL Annual Conference & Exhibition – Liverpool, April 2019
Location:
Room 3a, Echo Arena, Liverpool
Liverpool: Pronunciation is part language and part skill, part productive and part receptive. This means that we must vary the way we teach it. In this talk, I will explain how we can approach pronunciation teaching from four angles, labelled muscle, mind, meaning and memory. I will demonstrate activities for each of these from the ELTons-award winning books PronPack 1-4.
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