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!
Students look at a picture and try to describe it from memory. They listen to a poem and relate it to the picture. Then they read the poem and decide on the points of view in each verse.
In Pen Pictures 1, pupils are given attractive visuals to fire their imagination and support them in writing a variety of different texts. These include writing a dialogue, a poem, a notice, an advert, a postcard and a short composition.
There are lots of different game types in this book - board games, crossword puzzles, card games, chant games... Why games? I like them because they offer bite-sized challenge.
If you, the teacher, don't have your students' attention, they aren't going to learn anything from you. If that's what you want, here are some tips for you (If you DO want their attention, just reverse the tips!).
IATEFL Pronunciation SIG newsletter Speak Out, Dec 2006
This article consists of two parts. In the first part, I will argue that the rejection of certain pronunciation materials on the grounds that they are not communicative may be unjustified. In this argument, I will make use of the concept of language play.
There's so much more to teaching pronunciation than drilling and the phonetic alphabet. A few simple exercises can open your students' senses to the rhythms and patterns of speech.
Imagine this. You're moving into a brand new flat. Everything is empty, just waiting for you to inhabit it in the way you please. Everything functions perfectly, from the plumbing to the electricity, from the gas to the phone line.
If you want your students to be able to say ‘I can speak English’, they need speaking practice in class. But this often turns out to be difficult and messy, and many teachers avoid it. In this workshop, we will classify the practical problems of speaking practice activities into three kinds, relating to:
IATEFL Pronunciation Sig magazine 'Speak Out', issue 30, Sept 2003
For me, the first example that springs to mind when talking about minimal pairs is ship or sheep. This is almost certainly due to the influence of the title of the well known book Ship or Sheep by Anne Baker. The formula is this: take a word, remove one of the phonemes and replace it with another such that it forms a different word.
We will look at 8 features of pronunciation which are of particular relevance for Spanish speaking learners of English. These will include vowels, spelling of vowels, consonants, clusters, word stress, stress patterns, tonic syllables and joined up speech. Each feature will be explained, contrasted with Spanish and demonstrated with an example game.
