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!
In this free webinar, I’m talking about accent in ELT: what we need to know and why. I will also show how we can help learners to understand accent variation in a practical, classroom-friendly way. Sign up here!
Accent for Listeners (AFL) focuses on helping learners to develop the flexibility to deal with accent variation: English is a global language, and naturally, there is a huge variety in the way it i
Annie has worked in ELT with great passion for the last 40 years, but her teaching career began even before that, in her home town of Liverpool. She qualified there as a teacher in 1976 and went on to teach history in secondary schools.
In this presentation, we will look at the need to talk about accent, both for the benefit of our learners, and for our own professional development.
1. For learners, accent awareness is relevant for both speaking and listening:
"PronPack: The Minimal Pair Collection" - this new book takes an accent-friendly approach to teaching the segmentals of English pronunciation. You can download some free sample material from the book in the PDF below.
Intelligibility does not depend on having a standard accent. In this presentation, I will suggest that it is possible to teach pronunciation in a way which is more flexible and accepting of different accents. The presentation will present practical teaching ideas, while at the same time introducing four principles for accent-friendly pronunciation teaching:
I have made 50 of these Pair Squares (minimal pairs, squared) for different phoneme contrasts in English (download the PDFs in two files below!). One person says one of the phrases, the others have to identify which one they think they heard.
The newest additions to the PronPack family are the books in the Pronunciation for Listening series, which focus on pronunciation as a receptive skill. These books are user-friendly, with short, well-signposted chapters providing maximum accessibility for the busy teacher.
