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.
Colegios Arenas, Facultad Filologia, Las Palmas, Gran Canaria
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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.
LILA, New Barratt House, 47 North John Street, Liverpool L2 6SG
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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.
The slides from the talk can be found below. Also, check out the 'Materials' section of this website to see full downloads, including audio in some cases, and lesson plans for some of the activities demonstrated in the talk.
(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.
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.
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.
See a video of this talk here. Each language has a repertoire of sounds which are used to make meaningful distinctions. When teaching the sounds of English, we need to keep that practical purpose in mind.
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.
