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!
For the native listener, homophones, puns, misheard lyrics and the like are the occasional source of delight. For the learner listener, they belong to the surreal soundscapes they inhabit for much of the time. This talk will explore the intersection between pronunciation and listening, in order to identify what it is that makes listening so tricky and weird for the individuals in our classes.
Sometimes pronunciation deserves more than a passing correction or one-off task. In this workshop, we will see how pronunciation points can be worked on from various different angles, in coherent and enjoyable task sequences. Participants will try out example activities and discuss them. You can download the slides below.
There is a write-up of this talk here. Accent can be a problem in English teaching. Which accent do we take as a model? Must it be a native-speaker accent? Must it be a prestige accent?
Following last weeks post featuring a box set on the price/prize minimal pair, here's a box set on the bean/bin distinction. Again, one person is the speaker and says one of the phrases. His/her partner is the listener and says which they understood - A, B, C or D.
This image is a minimal pair, squared - what I call a box set. One person says one of the phrases. The other has to listen and say A, B, C or D. The minimal pairs in this instance involve /s/ and /z/ - these are a pair of related consonants, the first unvoiced and the second, voiced.
This pair of sentences could almost be phrasal homophones (oronyms), except for the differences in punctuation. They play with the fact that the sound bite 'call Dan' is identical to the sound bite 'called Anne'. There are also two meanings of 'called' (to phone or shout out to someone or to be named), which make the pair of sentences rather confusing!
There is something missing at the heart of the listening component in most ELT course materials. They fail to dig deep into the actual raw material of the skill – what Richard Cauldwell calls the ‘sound substance’.
