Pronunciation to go: learning to learn from the dictionary

(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. Each time you teach a learner to pronounce a word, their English benefits a little, but they remain dependent on you. If, however, you can show your learners how to teach themselves the pronunciation of a word using the dictionary, they can improve their own English independently for ever more. In this talk, we look at how we can prepare learners to make the most of this huge resource. We will see how the transcriptions in a dictionary are like an x-ray enabling you to look inside a word. Transcriptions remain a valuable resource even in this days of click-to-hear, since the ears are not always as reliable as we think. There is a video which demonstrates how the ears can be mislead here. There's a short article dealing with the subject matter of this talk here (but note that the stress markings have come out erroneously). There's an OUP video my interview after giving the talk at IATEFL here.