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!
Thank you for coming to my talk on Pronunciation as a Listening Skill. As a follow up, I'd like to provide links to all the material mentioned in the session. First of all, the authentic listening about Facebook comes from Unit 50 of this book.
Perhaps the most important part of effective teaching is the ability to motivate our learners. Part of this ability lies in the personal style of the teacher. But motivation can also be boosted by well-selected and well-prepared methods and means.
What’s your ELT footprint? This is one of the questions we will look into in “A Map of ELT” at the English UK North academic conference in Leeds on Saturday Oct 8th. After looking at the map and how it is organized, we’ll consider how it may be used for teacher reflection, critical awareness and for a ‘bigger picture’ perspective on topical issues in ELT.
Ray Parker argued that, regarding stress-timing and rhythm, we have tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The notion that natural spoken English has a regular rhythm, he says, has been discredited by the research, but our response has been to abandon both that, and any attention to stress-timing.
Mark: Great pronunciation event at the weekend. Adrian Underhill shared insights in how sounds are articulated and relate to one another (see his blog on the phonemic chart here).
This talk was part of a day of pronunciation talks organized by the IATEFL PronSig in collaboration with the ELT website Teachitworld. In my talk, we took a playful approach to the teaching of pronunciation.
Pronunciation is just as important for listening as for speaking. In this workshop, we will look at what features make connected speech difficult to follow. We will try out a series of tasks and games for raising awareness of these features. Finally, I will suggest how teachers can prepare their own micro-listening activities.
There's more than one way to motivate. In this talk, we take a tour of the Map of Motivation, from aspirations through subject matter, classroom conditions and effective learning. The main slides from the talk and the handout can be found below. There's also a ten minute video tour of the map.
Take a trip round the Map of Motivation. This is a tour designed specifically for English language teachers who find the whole conceptual area of motivation a bit diverse and difficult to hold in your head all at once. Just click on the movie below, and please give us any feedback that occurs to you, ideas for improvement and so on!
