(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.
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.
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.
Songs are a particularly useful resource for ELT. They have language, motivational appeal and great mnemonic power. In this presentation, we will look at different ways in which we can unlock their potential. We will try out a series of activities to use before, during and after the song.
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.
