News and Views

Take a look at a video of an English pronunciation lesson, with me using materials and techniques from  PronPack 1-4.  I explain that there are four kinds of activities, which may be summed up as muscle, mind, meaning and memory.
First, I demonstrate an activity to show students how the muscles around the mouth work to produce a pair of target vowel sounds. Then we see an activity to raise awareness in the students’ minds of how those sounds correlate to spelling. After that, we an activity to demonstrate to the students how this feature of pronunciation impacts on meaning. Finally, we see an activity designed to leave a strong trace of this pronunciation feature in the students’ memory.

There’s a great review of PronPack in the July-August edition of IATEFL Voices, by Tony Rusinak in Canada. Here are a few excerpts…

“Mark Hancock’s PronPack, a set of four pronunciation resource books, can be described as clever, original and well-organised.”
“After trialling PronPack, some co-teachers and I found the tasks both practical and entertaining.”
“A key feature of the series is the graphic design.  … high-gloss inventive infographics, thoughtfully-sized font, sufficient white space and clear, concise instructions…”
“The smart layout of the books re-affirms Hancock’s knowledge of busy teachers’ requirements when trying to integrate pronunciation into a demanding lesson plan.”
“In the introduction, Hancock claims that ‘the aim is successful communication, not correctness’, a point cleverly woven into the activities.”

PronPack has won the 2018 ELTons Award for ‘Excellence in Teacher Resources’. A judge’s quote says, ‘These books will soon become a must have resource on teacher staff room shelves’. Let it be!

(Thanks to David Lake for the photo)

In my previous post, I promised to investigate possible implications a post-ELF perspective for pronunciation teaching, and in this post we will consider the question of what features of phonology we should focus on.

Let me begin with an analogy. If you think of a car, you can probably divide its features into essential and superficial. For example, wheels and a motor are essential (currently, at least). The colour doesn’t matter and is superficial, and the exact body shape probably doesn’t matter much either. There are even features which are accidental such as scratches and dents in the body work.

Continue reading “Post-ELF 4: Essential versus Superficial”

In my last post, article 2 in this series, I suggested that pronunciation teaching post-ELF must distinguish productive and receptive competences, and these will be asymmetrical.

In an English-as-a-lingua-franca speech community, we will pronounce locally and understand globally. The accent or range of accents we can produce will be much smaller than the range of accents we are capable of understanding. Continue reading “Post-ELF 3: A Hierarchy of Pronunciation Skills”

In my first post, article 1 in this series , I suggested that we must take account of the ELF premise – namely, that English is now used as a global lingua franca – when we are thinking about the goals of pronunciation teaching. One broad implication of this premise is suggested by the prism and light metaphor in the image above. The prism represents the ELF premise. In a pre-ELF scenario, our model of pronunciation is like the white beam of light before it enters the prism. It is a single, monolithic model – perhaps RP or General American. The vision is that everybody would learn to speak that way and everybody would come to understand English spoken that way. There was a symmetry therefore between productive and receptive pronunciation. Continue reading “Post-ELF 2: Accent Snobbery”

Being interviewed by Dirk Lagerwaard for his NovELTies vlog : NovELTies EP25: Mark Hancock – Teaching Pronunciation. Among the topics up for discussion is the idea of ‘correctness’ in the context of pronunciation. I suggest that mostly, there’s no such thing as ‘correct’. When people say things like ‘No, it’s not pronounced like that’, they are using a sneaky passive. Not pronounced BY WHO? By what right do these ghostly referees define what is correct and what is not?

Continue reading “What does ‘correct’ mean in pronunciation teaching?”