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:
Friday, March 17, 2017 - 11:30
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.
Event date:
Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - 10:15
Location:
Boisdale 1, Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SECC) Exhibition Way, Glasgow G3 8YW
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?
Tuesday - November 29th, 2016
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.
Thursday - November 24th, 2016
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.
Tuesday - November 22nd, 2016
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!
Wednesday - November 16th, 2016
Look at the pictures. Are the two pictures: a. a minimal pair, b. homophones, c. whatever?
Sunday - November 13th, 2016
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’.
- Materials design
- Listening
- Pronunciation
Tuesday - October 25th, 2016
The school was big, really big
I didn’t want to go
There were lots of kids, tall kids
Kids I didn’t know
I saw some friends from primary school
But only three or four
How many kids were in this school?
A thousand, maybe more!
Tuesday - October 25th, 2016
Eighth and last in the series Accent through the keyhole. Scroll down for the mp3 podcast version.
What’s the correct answer to the accent by numbers puzzle?
Wednesday - October 19th, 2016
Happy to see a review of our website in IATEFL Voices Issue 253, by Jennifer St.John of the University of Ottawa. Here are a few excerpts
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