News and Views

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?”

Do you remember the millennium bug? We were all warned that on new year’s day of 2000, our computers would cease to function properly. Didn’t happen. What DID happen around that time however was a quiet but seismic shift in assumptions about the goals of pronunciation teaching.

In the late nineties, people like Brian Jenner were already worrying away at the unchallenged assumption that learners should aim for one of the standard, prestige accents of English such as RP. Jenner (Jenner 1997) pointed out that millions of people were able to make themselves understood in any number of regional or global native accents, so why would we insist on a specific variety? Continue reading “Post-ELF 1: The ELF-Premise”

Video of Mark being interviewed by Rebecca Place of TESOL Spain. Here are the main points: Continue reading “Pronunciation: Teach a skill, not an accent.”

In this article, I will present and explain a map of the vowel system specifically created to guide the general English language learner. The map is designed with three main aims in mind:

1. To provide useful insights for the learner.
2.  To support memorable and effective classroom activities.
3. To be relevant in an international context by being flexible enough to deal with accent variation.

Continue reading “Putting Vowels on the Map”

Here’s a link to a video of a seminar I did at the British Council in London, with an assortment of classroom activities to focus on phonemes.

Here’s a link to the webinar I gave at Brazil’s English Teachers (BRELT) ‘Pronunciation Week’. In it, you’ll find explanations of the rationale for dividing pronunciation material into four broad categories: workouts, puzzles, pairworks and poems.