Talks, presentations and workshops

Pronunciation work can be the most enjoyable part of a lesson but for this to happen, we need to move beyond ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and instead explore language together with our students in a spirit of collaborative discovery. In this session, I will demonstrate examples of how I think this can be done.

Pronunciation teaching is sometimes held back by an unhelpful insistence on the phonetic detail of target models. Some features, such as the schwa for example, seem to almost acquire the status of icons. What happens if we knock these icons off their pedestals? This presentation will start a day of talks brought together by IATEFL's Pronunciation SIG and Global Issues SIG.

In this talk, I will present a pedagogical chart of English vowels set in a hexagon figure. I will explain the rationale behind the design, which is based on a system of rings and spokes, with the long vowels in the outer ring, the short vowels in the inner ring and the schwa at the centre.

There is a write-up of this talk here. Accent can be a problem in English teaching. Which accent do we take as a model? Must it be a native-speaker accent? Must it be a prestige accent?