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!
This was a presentation of some key ideas which emerged from a large teacher development project, from needs analysis through observations to recommendations and workshops, at the Cultura Inglesa in Rio de Janeiro.
Danny, an IH teacher trainer in London, began by suggesting that after classroom speaking activities, many teachers make the mistake of feeding back only on task achievement, rather than getting up close to the processes and strategies by which the learners reached this outcome.
Yolanda, a PHD candidate from Galicia, Spain, reported on her research into how students and teachers at post-secondary level in Galicia perceive the importance of pronunciation in ELT, and how it is covered in schools. She began by pointing out how problematic this area is.
Mike spoke of the importance of experimental practice (EP) for a teacher’s professional development, and he developed the topic through the metaphor of exploration and travel. He began by showing my (Mark Hancock’s) Map of ELT as an example of this kind of spatial metaphor, but explained that his own presentation would be less analytical.
The Pronunciation SIG Pre-conference event for 2013 took an ELF perspective on teaching pronunciation. The speakers were Robin Walker, Grzegorz Spiewak and Mark Hancock, and it was hosted by Wayne Rimmer. Robin Walker started off the day by showing the differences this perspective makes in terms of goals, models, view of L1, variations and accents, and intelligibility.
Richard Cauldwell is gradually developing a whole new set of words and images for conceptualizing connected speech, and his system is given power by his long experience in close analysis of natural, unscripted recordings. His principle claim is that unscripted speech radically departs from anything that the written form might lead us to expect.
Alan began by setting up a model of professional discourses in ELT. On a vertical axis, we have academic at the top and the classroom at the bottom. On a horizontal axis, we have native speaker perspectives on the left and non-native speaker perspectives on the right.
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. Find PDF of handout below...
(You can find Mark's powerpoint slide show at the foot of this page, and an interview at IATEFL here) (Read a summary here) The concept of English as a Lingua Franca is not new, and research into ELF has
Graham began with the premise, based on the work of Andrei Aleinkov (1989), that creative pedagogy leads to motivation and promotes lifelong learning. It leads to fluency of idea generation, flexibility, originality and elaboration (building new ideas on what is already known).
