Pronunciation is not only about the mouth, but also the ears. And, with English being a global language, the ears must learn to be flexible in order to make sense of all those varieties of spoken English out there. This article is about helping learners to deal with this variety.
Images could be described this way: "A picture is a text without words". This is what makes them invaluable for the language classroom. They provide rich and immediate content, but they leave it up to the student how to put that into words. They can't 'cut and paste' as they can from a text. It doesn't put words in their mouths.
These are a series of practical teaching ideas which I have been contibuting to the IATEFL Pron Sig magazine 'Speak Out'. They cover a range of different pronunciation issues:
1. Contrastive stress
2. The final -s suffix - plurals, present simple, possessives
3. Consonant sounds /t/ and /d/ at the ends of words
4. Dividing text into tone units
IATEFL young learners sig journal CATS, Spring 2000
Writing has a bad reputation in many schools, for both teachers and students. For the teacher, it means marking a pile of compositions and they are almost always worse than expected. For many students, writing is a boring chore and an “opportunity” to make a lot of mistakes.However, we believe that writing can be a very interesting and involving activity for students of English.
IATEFL young learners sig journal CATS, Spring 2000
Writing has a bad reputation in many schools, for both teachers and students. For the teacher, it means marking a pile of compositions and they are almost always worse than expected. For many students, writing is a boring chore and an “opportunity” to make a lot of mistakes.However, we believe that writing can be a very interesting and involving activity for students of English.
'Say please!', children are often told, after saying something like 'Give me a biscuit'. If they ask why, they may receive the explanation, 'Because it's polite'. We English teachers sometimes do the same.
Procedia Social and Behavioural Sciences 3 (2010) 24-27
In this article, we will look at the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and why extrinsic motivation alone is not satisfactory for learning in the long run. It is suggested that although students may embark on learning for extrinsic reasons, a more intrinsic motivation can be developed in the classroom.
IATEFL Pronunciation SIG newsletter Speak Out, Dec 2006
This article consists of two parts. In the first part, I will argue that the rejection of certain pronunciation materials on the grounds that they are not communicative may be unjustified. In this argument, I will make use of the concept of language play.
There's so much more to teaching pronunciation than drilling and the phonetic alphabet. A few simple exercises can open your students' senses to the rhythms and patterns of speech.
IATEFL Pronunciation Sig magazine 'Speak Out', issue 30, Sept 2003
For me, the first example that springs to mind when talking about minimal pairs is ship or sheep. This is almost certainly due to the influence of the title of the well known book Ship or Sheep by Anne Baker. The formula is this: take a word, remove one of the phonemes and replace it with another such that it forms a different word.
