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!
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.
Thanks for coming to this talk! The empty worksheet templates and slides from the talk are downloadable at the bottom of this page. The worksheets and audio for the raps are here: The Brothers and Pasta.
The Albert Hall, Dumbarton Road, Stirling, Scotland
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What is to become of pronunciation teachng in these post-ELF times? Thanks for coming to this talk. The slides can be downloaded below. The pronunciation errors diagnosis game can be found here.
This chant is made up of five rhyming couplets, and it has an unusual density of TH-sounds (the hard TH in 'earth' and the soft TH in 'brother'. The hard TH is called ‘theta’, and for convenience, I’ll use that name to refer to both sounds.
This is a board game for use in teacher training. Players can use a dice and counter. They take turns to throw the dice and move. They should explain the pronunciation error in the sentence they land on, and match it with one of the causes in 1-5 at the top of the board.
The image above is the answer key to a surprisingly tricky puzzle which requires learners to keep a clear distinction in mind between the spelling of words and the way they are pronounced.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional issue 22 May 2019
Pronunciation straddles two domains: it is part language – like grammar or vocabulary – and part skill – like speaking or listening. This unique position makes pronunciation teaching interestingly varied, and potentially very enjoyable too. It is so much more than the ‘listen-and-repeat’ stereotype that is sometimes attached to it, and can’t be reduced to one single thing in this way. In this article, I will suggest that we can, in fact, divide it into four general areas, and I will label these with a mnemonic of four words, each beginning with m: muscle, mind, meaning and memory.
In this workshop, we will consider what counts as success in pronunciation, especially in the light of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). We will then try out some activities which I have found to be successful over 30 years of writing pronunciation materials, and discuss how these can be used in a way which enhances the learner’s communicative success.
Humanising Language Teaching Apr 2019 - Year 21 - Issue 2
We sometimes dehumanize pronunciation in the way we talk about it. If a learner mispronounces a word, we might say, ‘It isn’t pronounced like that; it’s pronounced …’ (and then we model the ‘correct’ way). In the dictionary, there are transcriptions to tell us how words are pronounced. Talking about weak forms, we might say, ‘In these words, the vowel sound is reduced to a schwa’.
