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.
Pronunciation teaching can be a joy – it doesn’t have to be all complicated theory and difficult symbols. This is equally true whether you are teaching face to face or online. With a playful and experimental approach, it can be a part of the lesson that your students look forward to most.
What are the main pronunciation difficulties which Spanish learners have with English? In this practical session, I will suggest my top six, along with some fun ideas for dealing with them in class. Bearing in mind that the purpose of pronunciation teaching is to help learners become more intelligible, we also consider which features of Spanish-accented English are not problematic.
In this practical webinar, we look at some of the most important pronunciation issues for Spanish-speaking learners of English. A PDF of the slides can be downloaded below. The presentation contains example activities taken from the recently publishd PronPack 6: Pronunciation of English for Spanish Speakers.
This webinar looks at four kinds of classroom activities and materials for teaching pronunciation. Here are links to the resources mentioned in the talk:
The results of a short dictation, a simple and easily set up classroom activity, can offer teachers a wealth of information regarding learners’ listening needs. It also brings listening into the classroom in such a way that it’s open to inspection by the learners and teachers together.
Phonemic symbols – we love them or hate them, but often for the wrong reasons. For some, they are symbols of an elite accent which is not our own. But there is an alternative way of viewing them which is less prescriptive and more tolerant of accent variation. From this angle, they can be symbols of empowerment.
Pronunciation teaching can be a joy – it doesn’t have to be all complicated theory and difficult symbols. With a playful and experimental approach, it can be a part of the lesson that your students look forward to most. In this session, we will take a look at some example activities designed to practise some of the pronunciation features that Spanish learners need to focus on.
Most learners today need English to communicate in a lingua franca (ELF) environment. The recognition of this fact has disrupted pronunciation teaching. What model can learners aspire to if not a ‘native speaker’ model? What can be considered ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’? In this talk, we will look at what is to become of pronunciation teaching these post-ELF times.
Collecting information about students' listening abilities and needs is a relatively easy thing to do, and access to such information can be used to inform and guide classroom practice. In this talk, we'll examine some classroom listening data, and share ideas on what it suggests for an emergent classroom listening syllabus.
In this practical session, I present simple tips on how to give more weight to pronunciation by exploiting the book more thoroughly and supplementing where necessary. The Pasta rap activity is here. The handout, slides and game can be downloaded below.
