Pronunciation made practical
Minimal pairs. Context will often disambiguate, as it hopefully does in this cartoon! But pronunciation problems tend to hunt in packs, and the resulting chaos is less easy to find your way out of. You end up having to unpick the problems one by one anyway. Minimal pairs.
Showing again how homophones are not only restricted to single words, here’s one consisting of two words with consonant-vowel linking. You can never be quite sure where one word ends and another begins in speech!
And this week’s winner in the facebook contest was Barbara Connelly with ‘Grade A’ = ‘Grey day’!
Homophones are pairs of words such as piece and peace, with different meaning but the same pronunciation. But they may also be phrases which are more than just one word, as in this challenge. In this pair, the homophones occur because two words link together and it’s not clear where the boundary between them lies – there are two possibilities! Can you find the homophones?
This homophone hunt went on Facebook, and the winner is… Jolanta Nyczke with sick snails = six nails!
BrELT is ‘a global ELT community made by Brazilians’ and what a community it is – amazing energy and initiative, and an important part of any teacher’s personal learning network, in Brazil and beyond. But it’s not only online – there are now physical conferences too. This event is their second, and I’m honored to have been invited! More about the event here!
Mishearings are often very surprising! But even so, there’s often a perfectly logical explanation. In this case, the speaker does the following: Continue reading “How is that even possible!?”
Delighted
to announce that PronPack is now available in Greece and Cyprus from our distributor in the region, DES. They have a great deal on the set of four books. Check it out!
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. Continue reading “Video – Teaching Pronunciation: muscle, mind, meaning, 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.” Continue reading “PronPack review in IATEFL Voices”
When the implications of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) first hit the consciousness of the ELT community at the beginning of this century, reactions tended to polarize between dogma and denial. On the dogma side were militants who saw native pronunciation models such as received pronunciation (RP) as a residue of colonialism which needed to be uprooted. From the denial point of view, these militants were a noisy distraction who would hopefully tire themselves out and go away. These are caricatures admittedly, but let’s run with them a little… Continue reading “Post-ELF 5: Beyond Dogma and Denial”
PronPack 1-4 has won the 2018 ELTons Award for ‘Innovation 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! Continue reading “PronPack Wins ELTons Award!”