Mark Hancock

Pronunciation is just as important for listening as for speaking. In this workshop, we will look at what features make connected speech difficult to follow. We will try out a series of tasks and games for raising awareness of these features. Finally, I will suggest how teachers can prepare their own micro-listening activities.

This year’s PCE is an extended workshop with the very practical goal of giving you the tools you need to make your own pronunciation materials. The rationale is that the amount and variety of material available does not match the huge interest in pronunciation.

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.

We will look at features of pronunciation which are relevant for French learners of English. These will include vowels, consonants, spelling patterns, word stress, rhythm, tonic stress and connected speech. Each feature will be explained and demonstrated with an example game. Get the sound charts and other classroom material here.

In this session, I will deal with the question of how pronunciation teaching can be flexible  enough to accommodate different varieties of English. We will focus on individual sounds, and I will begin by presenting a new phonemic chart and explain how it is organized. We will then look at areas of the sound  system which are particularly prone to variation across different UK accents.