Talks, presentations and workshops

Listening lessons often encourage students to use strategies to guess meaning, without developing their ability to decode spoken English itself. Could focusing on language chunks be a missing link which helps students improve their listening skills? In this talk we’ll take a look at activities which might just do that.

Tonicity is a speaker’s use of stress to focus a listener’s attention. It’s an aspect of pronunciation which is often neglected, but is crucial in getting meaning across. In this session we will look at ways of presenting and practicing this important skill in the language class. The slides can be downloaded below. See more about Mark's books here.

Pronunciation teaching can be fun, but in a world where English is a lingua franca, we need to take a flexible approach. We can’t simply preach a single ideal target model, instead, we must teach learners to be adaptable, both receptively and productively. In this session, I will demonstrate this. Download the slides from the talk below.

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.