We often present at ELT conferences and events. Just select the title below if you're looking for the handout or download from a talk or workshop you have attended.
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.
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.
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.
When it comes to ‘doing’ listening, many students feel they are starting from scratch rather than building on what they have already mastered. In this workshop, we’ll discuss the notion of ‘verbal stickiness’, and consider how we could exploit this phenomenon by focusing on various language patterns and using different activities to help students become more efficient and fluent listeners.
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!
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.
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.
We teachers have a characteristic way of talking which we can easily identify, even out of context. So what are the features that make it so distinctive? In this session we will look, with the help of a little comedy, at some aspects of teacher talk and classroom interaction.
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?
We will look at features of pronunciation which are relevant for French learners of English. These will include vowels, consonants, spelling patterns, word stress, rhythm, tonic stress and connected speech. Each feature will be explained and demonstrated with an example game. Get the sound charts and other classroom material here.
