All content by Mark is listed below:
I got my first teaching job in 1984, working at a large boy's secondary school in El Obeid, Sudan. This experience made it very clear to me that there's a lot more to teaching English than just being able to speak the language!
Event date:
Saturday, October 21, 2017 - 18:00
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.
Friday - May 12th, 2017
Last class, a South Korean student told me about his weekend visit to Liverpool. He said it wasn’t easy to understand the local way of speaking, and gave the example of the question word What? He demonstrated how this word had been said, with the final ‘t’ replaced with a silence, or glottal stop, so it sounds like wha’?
Thursday - May 11th, 2017
The long and short i sounds cause problems for a lot of learners, who cannot hear or produce the difference between pairs of words like bin and bean.
Tuesday - May 2nd, 2017
This activity is a free sample from PronPack 2: Pronunciation Puzzles. It can be very tricky to distinguish /s/ from /z/ at the end of a word. Try this maze to see if you can do it. If you find it hard, try two strategies:
Monday - April 24th, 2017
This activity is a free sample from PronPack 1: Pronunciation Workouts. It focuses on raising awareness of the role of the tongue, jaw and lips in forming the vowel sounds.
Monday - April 17th, 2017
Sunday - April 9th, 2017
Many teachers worry about what the best model accent should be, and whether their own accent serves as a suitable model. My argument is that the premise of the question is wrong – there needn’t be a single model accent, and that the teacher’s own accent will usually be the best model, providing that the teacher is an intelligible speaker of English.
- Culture
- Listening
- Pronunciation
Saturday - April 1st, 2017
Event date:
Saturday, April 1, 2017 - 10:15
English Pronunciation in Use gets a new look this month. The new cover design comes along with a new approach to audio - instead of being on a set of 5 CDs (which were expensive), the audio is now a free online download. Makes the whole package much more affordable.
Wednesday - March 8th, 2017
Event date:
Saturday, March 4, 2017 - 13:15
Peter Medgyes brought to TESOL Spain a quirky plenary which somehow managed to be poetic, theatrical and intellectual at the same time. The performance amused and enchanted the audience, myself included – I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, it left some puzzled as to what it was about. As one teacher commented to me, ‘What is ELF, and why is it important?’.
Wednesday - March 8th, 2017
Event date:
Sunday, March 5, 2017 - 13:30
TESOL Spain 2017 finished up with a compelling plenary from Silvana Richardson on native-speakerism and bias in ELT. She covered the topic from many angles, but out of all of them, I would just like to focus on one – the use of the phrase “native-speaker teachers” as a pull-factor in advertising language courses. Why has this come to be seen as a good thing - if indeed it has been?
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