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!
Pronunciation is just as important for listening as for speaking. In this workshop, we looked at how to help learners to understand authentic English by focusing on pronunciation. Specifically, we looked at features of connected speech and accent. You can download the slides and handout for the talk below.
I talked about "Motivation: the inside story" in Badajoz on May 4th. Here are materials from the talk, just click on the links and while you're here, take a look around and leave some feedback! And see the PDF downloads below for the handout.
The general knowledge quiz will get your students listening intently for 10 minutes. The ten questions contain plenty of repetition and redundancy to help students get there in the end, even if they miss a bit along the way. Read it aloud yourself or use the mp3 provided.
In this personality test, students choose the option which best represents their attitude in various situations. From this, they 'discover' whether they are driven more by rationality or emotion.
In this activity, students get the chance to play Sherlock Holmes! They look at the evidence in a picture and try to work out what the owner of the bag did during the last few days. It's an enjoyable way to get some elementary level practice in using the simple past tense.
This picture story is from Pen Pictures 2. It helps students learn to structure their writing - each Part of the story corresponds to one 'step' in the classic narrative structure situation-problem-solution-conclusion.
Images could be described this way: "A picture is a text without words". This is what makes them invaluable for the language classroom. They provide rich and immediate content, but they leave it up to the student how to put that into words. They can't 'cut and paste' as they can from a text. It doesn't put words in their mouths.
This is a fun way to introduce the topic and vocabulary area of describing people. It is a sample activity from English Result Intermediate by Mark Hancock and Annie McDonald (Oxford University Press)
These are a series of practical teaching ideas which I have been contibuting to the IATEFL Pron Sig magazine 'Speak Out'. They cover a range of different pronunciation issues:
1. Contrastive stress
2. The final -s suffix - plurals, present simple, possessives
3. Consonant sounds /t/ and /d/ at the ends of words
4. Dividing text into tone units
