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!
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’.
PronPack is now available in Australia from Bookery. To celebrate, we have added Australia to our atlas of Air Traffic Control maps. Download it from here (Activity 3.1 new versions).
Liverpool: Pronunciation is part language and part skill, part productive and part receptive. This means that we must vary the way we teach it. In this talk, I will explain how we can approach pronunciation teaching from four angles, labelled muscle, mind, meaning and memory. I will demonstrate activities for each of these from the ELTons-award winning books PronPack 1-4.
ATHENS: Find the slides in the PDF download below! See more about PronPack here. See video of Mark teaching a pronunciation class here. Also follow these links for some of the materials used in the talk:
THESSALONIKI: Pronunciation crosses two domains: it is part language - like grammar or vocabulary, and part skill - like speaking or listening. This makes pronunciation teaching very interesting, and great fun too. Come and see how! Download the slides and audio below!
In this article, I will suggest that following the recognition of English’s role as a global Lingua Franca, there has been an impasse created by two conflicting reactions: dogma and denial. I will discuss the possible implications of ELF for pronunciation teaching goals, and suggest how we can distinguish features which are important for global intelligibility from those which are not.
The slides for this presentation, as well as some Do-It-Yourself templates, can be downloaded below. See here for more about the PronPack books. Pronunciation straddles two domains: it is part language - like grammar or vocabulary, and part skill - like speaking or listening.
1 Know your objective. Pronunciation is about being understood by people all over the globe. It’s not about pretending to be American or British. You don’t need to teach every small detail of the way they speak in the US or UK – very few learners will ever learn that, and there is no reason to anyway. English is a world language now – it doesn’t belong to any particular country.
