Talks in 12/2024

Songs have long been popular with language teachers. They demonstrate language in a memorable, motivating way. However, all too often, the exploitation is limited to gap filling. In this workshop, we will look at other ways in which they can be used in the classroom.

In this talk I will highlight some patterns in English language classroom talk. I will suggest how these patterns arise, and what their implications are for language learning. I will conclude that it may be better not to talk like a teacher sometimes.

(I have also presented this talk at TEA (Canary Islands) and as a plenary at CETA (Cordoba, Spain))

If you want your students to be able to say ‘I can speak English’, they need speaking practice in class. But this often turns out to be difficult and messy, and many teachers avoid it. In this workshop, we will classify the practical problems of speaking practice activities into three kinds, relating to:

Cultural awareness seems to be making a re-appearance in the language teaching and learning literature. In this workshop we will focus on the ‘new look’ cultural awareness – intercultural competence (ICC). We will situate its growing importance and discuss what it entails. We will also take a look at a selection of classroom materials and briefly consider assessment of ICC.

In this workshop, we will look at the pronunciation of grammar features including verb inflections, contractions, auxiliaries, part of speech and clause structure. We will see how the pronunciation of these features is particularly important for meaning, and can be easily integrated into course materials. We will look at ways of working on these areas of pronunciation.

Providing feedback is one of the most commonly conceived functions of a teacher, yet, according to Nunan (1991), the ultimate effect of feedback is often doubtful. How do we tend to respond to students' written work? What messages are we sending to our students as a result? Is the ultimate effect really, as Nunan suggests, doubtful? What are the implications for our teaching?

In this presentation, we will look at intrinsic motivation in the ELT classroom. I will suggest that for a lesson to generate intrinsic motivation, it should appeal not also to the student-as-learner but also the student-as-person.

In this workshop, we will look at how politeness works in English. We will see that there is more than one kind of politeness, and it varies according to the relationship of speaker to listener. We will consider the problems this may present for learners and try out some classroom activities for raising awareness of this aspect of language.

How can we 'mark' students’ oral production? In this session, we will look at suitable tasks for classroom assessment. We will then look at criteria with which both teacher and students can evaluate speaking. You will leave the session with strategies for creating ‘marking menus’ which are balanced and appropriate for different tasks and levels.

In this workshop, we present a syllabus of 8 features of English pronunciation of relevance for Brazlian learners. Each of the 8 points are explained and illustrated with a pronunciation game. You can download the handout and the slide show for the talk below. The full instructions for most of the games can be found in the materials section of this site.

In this workshop, we’ll analyse some of the challenges language learners face when listening to authentic texts. Then we’ll take a walk through a listening lesson, trying out and discussing the different types of tasks which ‘teach’ listening, and help learners aspiring to B2 level become more effective, confident and autonomous listeners.

Nowadays, the internet gives us easy access to audio (and audio-visual) recordings, and, naturally, many learners of English will want / need / try to listen to some of what’s available. However, and despite the amount of time spent ‘doing’ listening in the language classroom, they will often feel frustrated when they try to follow such recordings.

In the first part of the talk, we will see how motivation leads to attention which in turn leads to learning. We will look at the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how the first leads to a better quality of attention. We will then look at strategies for creating intrinsic motivation in the classroom.

Are your students inspired by your lessons or has their interest expired!? What can you do to attract their attention and generate intrinsic motivation? Are there any strategies you can use or is it just a question of inspiration? These are some of the questions we will address in this session.

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 session is about helping learners to deal with this variety.

A session to present and explain a concept map of current ELT. The idea is to show how the different ideas and acronyms relate to one another, so that we can keep the big picture in mind. We need to see both the wood and the trees! See a related article here.

Read a full article based on the talk on the PDF at the bottom of this page. Listen to the podcast of the talk. How does technology relate to the human touch? And what else apart from these is there in the world of ELT?

Pronunciation is just as important for listening as for speaking. In this workshop, we will look at what features make connected speech difficult to follow. We will try out a series of tasks and games for raising awareness of these features. Finally, I will suggest how teachers can prepare their own micro-listening activities. Find PDF of handout below...

We will look at 8 features of pronunciation which are of particular relevance for Spanish speaking learners of English. These will include vowels, spelling of vowels, consonants, clusters, word stress, stress patterns, tonic syllables and joined up speech. Each feature will be explained, contrasted with Spanish and demonstrated with an example game.

Pronunciation is just as important for listening as for speaking. In this workshop, we will look at what features make connected speech difficult to follow. We will try out a series of tasks and games for raising awareness of these features. Finally, I will suggest how teachers can prepare their own micro-listening activities. Find PDF of handout below...

This talk was part of a day of pronunciation talks organized by the IATEFL PronSig in collaboration with the ELT website Teachitworld. In my talk, we took a playful approach to the teaching of pronunciation.

What’s your ELT footprint? This is one of the questions we will look into in “A Map of ELT” at the English UK North academic conference in Leeds on Saturday Oct 8th. After looking at the map and how it is organized, we’ll consider how it may be used for teacher reflection, critical awareness and for a ‘bigger picture’ perspective on topical issues in ELT.

In this talk we'll take a look at a variety of activities which could be used with a 51 second text to help learners become better listeners. See powerpoint slides below.

None of us throw our class into a listening unprepared, do we? It would be unfair - after all, in real life, we're normally listening with certain expectations. But often in ELT, our pre-listening activities are limited to a bit of discussion of the topic and maybe some pre-teaching of new vocabulary.

Perhaps the most important part of effective teaching is the ability to motivate our learners. Part of this ability lies in the personal style of the teacher. But motivation can also be boosted by well-selected and well-prepared methods and means.

None of us throw our class into a listening unprepared, do we? It would be unfair - after all, in real life, we're normally listening with certain expectations. But often in ELT, our pre-listening activities are limited to a bit of discussion of the topic and maybe some pre-teaching of new vocabulary.

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.

You have to pay attention to learn. So what kinds of classroom materials and activities motivate learners to pay attention? In this presentation, we will see motivation theory in the form of a map of an island with four main regions – subject, aspiration, learning and classroom. We will explore these regions and try out some classroom activities which illustrate them.

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.

What is motivation and what can we do in class to nurture it? In answer to the first question, I will present the various facets of motivation on a map with the four main corners being content, aspirations, learning and classroom. In answer to the second, we will try out some specific classroom ideas relating to each of the four corners.

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.

The slide show of this talk can be found on the PDF below. In this talk, we will focus on pronunciation at three levels – 1 sounds, 2 words, and 3 phrases. For each of these, we will look at some of the typical problems for Italian learners, and try out some fun activities for raising awareness of these.

On the surface of it, unscripted language is a total mess, and it's a wonder that anybody can understand any of it. It stops and starts, interrupts and stumbles, slows and accelerates, and generally breaks all the grammar rules you’ve ever learnt. So, how can we help learners to make sense of it?

Do you speak and teach in a standard RP accent? How bad is it if you don’t? In this session, we will look at a phonemic chart and how it is organised.  We will then consider some of the ways the sounds are different in the North of England.

Pronunciation lessons can be both fun and focussed. In this session, we will look at 8 features of English pronunciation which are of particular relevance for Spanish speaking learners of English. These will include vowels, spelling of vowels, consonants, clusters, word stress, stress patterns, tonic syllables and joined up speech.

In this session, I will deal with the question of how pronunciation teaching can be flexible  enough to accommodate different varieties of English. We will focus on individual sounds, and I will begin by presenting a new phonemic chart and explain how it is organized. We will then look at areas of the sound  system which are particularly prone to variation across different UK accents.

Unscripted language is usually very different to the spoken language students encounter when doing listening activities in a general English course. Consequently, when students come to listen to spontaneous chat or discussion they are faced with many difficulties. What might these be and what can we teachers do about it?

In this talk, we will look at ways of exploring sounds in class, in a way which is both meaningful and fun. The slide show for the talk can be downloaded below. Various versions of the sound chart can be downloaded from here.

Sometimes pronunciation deserves more than a passing correction or one-off task. In this workshop, we will see how pronunciation points can be worked on from various different angles, in coherent and enjoyable task sequences. The handout, slides and audio tracks used in the talk can be downloaded below. The raps are taken from my new book 'PronPack', which is coming soon! Keep checking back!

This year’s PCE is an extended workshop with the very practical goal of giving you the tools you need to make your own pronunciation materials. The rationale is that the amount and variety of material available does not match the huge interest in pronunciation.

In the IATEFL Forum on Creating Listening Materials, I'll be presenting 'Listening in Chunks' and a technique called 'accoustic drilling'. Students find this useful as it increases their automaticity when decoding clusters of words which frequently occur together. It also impacts positively on their listening fluency and confidence.

What are accents? How do they vary from place to place? How do they vary over time? What is the connection of accent to social class? What kinds of accent variation are there? What are the implications for language teaching? These are some of the questions we will be looking at in this guest lecture at NILE Manchester.

In this session, we look at pronunciation from the perspective of listening. Find the slides on a PDF below. Here are links to some of the materials used in the talk.

The "Lost" Rap

A song-based Mondegreen activity

There is a write-up of this talk here. Accent can be a problem in English teaching. Which accent do we take as a model? Must it be a native-speaker accent? Must it be a prestige accent?

In this talk, I will present a pedagogical chart of English vowels set in a hexagon figure. I will explain the rationale behind the design, which is based on a system of rings and spokes, with the long vowels in the outer ring, the short vowels in the inner ring and the schwa at the centre.

Pronunciation teaching is sometimes held back by an unhelpful insistence on the phonetic detail of target models. Some features, such as the schwa for example, seem to almost acquire the status of icons. What happens if we knock these icons off their pedestals? This presentation will start a day of talks brought together by IATEFL's Pronunciation SIG and Global Issues SIG.

Pronunciation work can be the most enjoyable part of a lesson but for this to happen, we need to move beyond ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and instead explore language together with our students in a spirit of collaborative discovery. In this session, I will demonstrate examples of how I think this can be done.

Pronunciation teaching can be fun, but in a world where English is a lingua franca, we need to take a flexible approach. We can’t simply preach a single ideal target model, instead, we must teach learners to be adaptable, both receptively and productively. In this session, I will demonstrate this. Download the slides from the talk below.

Tonicity is a speaker’s use of stress to focus a listener’s attention. It’s an aspect of pronunciation which is often neglected, but is crucial in getting meaning across. In this session we will look at ways of presenting and practicing this important skill in the language class. The slides can be downloaded below. See more about Mark's books here.

Listening lessons often encourage students to use strategies to guess meaning, without developing their ability to decode spoken English itself. Could focusing on language chunks be a missing link which helps students improve their listening skills? In this talk we’ll take a look at activities which might just do that.

Find the downloads for this webinar by following this link and going to the bottom of the page. The You Tube video of the webinar is here.

The title is "Pronunciation Teaching: going beyond listen and repeat", and here's a summary of the content, in prose form...

What exactly are we doing when we’re listening? In this session, we’ll try a little transcription experiment to find out. We’ll see that listening is not quite as passive, automatic or effortless as it may appear. We’ll then consider the difficulties of listening to speech in a non-native language before reflecting on the implications of our observations for classroom teaching.

Mark says: BrELT is "A Global ELT Community Made by Brazilians", and apart from energetically connecting teachers in online chats and sharing forums, they organise "On the Road" events, which people can attend in person. This year's edition is in São Paulo and I have been invited to be the first speaker on the day. This is what I plan to speak about:

What does pronunciation teaching look like, once we assimilate the basic fact that English is a global lingua franca? In this presentation, we will explore that question. We will look at which aspects of pronunciation are essential for intelligibility and which aspects are more optional. We will look in more detail at how this distinction manifests itself on a phonemic chart.

At the beginning of the workshop, participants will do a paused transcription activity to bring the listening processes employed by expert listeners to a level of consciousness. Expert listeners usually understand what they hear with a seemingly high degree of automaticity and lack of effort.

FREE WEBINAR!: Watch a recording here! Pronunciation is multi-faceted on account of its unique position on the boundary of language and skill, and the fact that it is both productive and receptive.

Download slides and other materials at the bottom of this page! Pronunciation crosses 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.

The slides for this presentation, as well as some Do-It-Yourself templates, can be downloaded below. See here for more about the PronPack books. Pronunciation straddles two domains: it is part language - like grammar or vocabulary, and part skill - like speaking or listening.

ATHENS: Find the slides in the PDF download below! See more about PronPack here. See video of Mark teaching a pronunciation class here. Also follow these links for some of the materials used in the talk:

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.