Pronunciation as a Listening Skill (TESOL France)

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. We focus on features of fast conversational English, and on parameters which are most vulnerable to variation across different accents. We also look at ways of exploiting authentic audio in the classroom. And last but not least, we discover the humour which can so easily emerge out of misunderstandings. The Youtube of the misheard lyrics song can be seen below.There are also downloads of the handout (jpeg), slides (in PDF) and audio (mp3) from the presentation. And here are links to lesson plans for some of the material mentioned in the talk.

The Word Blender

Sentence Search

Wrong Lyrics

Yes Today (Yesterday)

Hay Chewed (Hey Jude)

Carolyn Kerr, who was present at the talk, tried out some of the ideas and reported it on her blog here.