Pronunciation made practical
Mark Hancock at TESOL Italy, Rome, Nov 17th 14:00
“Pronunciation: be a teacher not a preacher”
Pronunciation teaching can be fun, but in a world where English is a lingua franca, we need to take a flexible approach. We can’t simply preach a single ideal target model, instead, we must teach learners to be adaptable, both receptively and productively. In this session, I will demonstrate this.
Presenting at the joint IATEFL PronSIG/GISIG event in London. Pronunciation teaching has neglected the ‘why’ wheel of the tricycle, leaving us with a default RP or GA model. Thanks to Laura Patsko for the photo.
Perhaps pronunciation teachers need a taxonomy of lower to higher order pronunciation skills. ‘Copy’ is at the lower end of the spectrum and ‘Accommodate’ at the higher end. If you’re around Madrid next week (Oct 20th), I’m doing a talk on it. http://hancockmcdonald.com/talks/pronunciation-be-teacher-not-preacher-0
Most teachers of English will have come across a sound chart at some point, but few realise how arbitrary they are. I do not mean ‘arbitrary’ in the negative sense of ‘with no good reason’, but rather in the sense that there are choices that the designer has had to make. At every stage in the creation of a chart, the author will have made decisions which could equally well have been otherwise. Phonetic facts interplay with pedagogic priorities and graphic limitations, and these forces do not always pull in the same direction, so that compromises are required. Chart design is as much an art as a science.
A chart is not objective reality, but one person’s model of reality. In this article, I will present a sound chart of my own creation and explain the rationale for the decisions I made when designing it. The full charts referred to below can be viewed here. Continue reading “The Art of the Chart”
Pronunciation Games (CUP 1995) was my first book, and it still sells today over two decades later. It’s a resource book for teachers, consisting of 36 photocopiable game pages along with step by step teaching notes. It proved to be immediately popular and won an award – the Frank Bell prize – shortly after publication. Nowadays, when I am out at ELT events, people often tell me how much they have been influenced by the book.
In the years since writing Pronunciation Games, I went on to write a wide variety of ELT books about pronunciation and other topics, but throughout that time, I have been reflecting on that first book: What was good about it? What were its shortcomings? What would I do differently today? The answer to these questions are what lie at the heart of my new series PronPack 1-4. Continue reading “From Pronunciation Games to PronPack”
Misunderstandings are going to happen, and not only involving people who are learning the language. This example could easily be between an Australian and a British speaker.
The /p/ and /b/ sounds cause problems for a lot of learners, who cannot hear or produce the difference between pairs of words like crap and crab.
Continue reading “Funny Misunderstandings”
In my last class, a South Korean student told me about his weekend visit to Liverpool. He said it wasn’t easy to understand the local way of speaking, and gave the example of the question word What? He demonstrated how this word had been said, with the final ‘t’ replaced with a silence, or glottal stop, so it sounds like wha’? Continue reading “The Sound of Silence”
A collection of extra resources like this to be added soon to the ‘Resources’ page! Free sample downloads for this activity in the ELT Materials section at hancockmcdonald.com.
Free sample downloads for this activity here in the Materials section at Hancock McDonald ELT website.
A collection of extra resources like this to be added soon to the ‘Resources’ page!