Click the picture above to access the handout and additional resources from my ACEIA conference session,
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roma★
occasionally subtle
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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Misplaced Lens Cap

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Click the picture above to access the handout and additional resources from my ACEIA conference session,
Here is the full chapter I adapted for the class on 2nd February
Forvo pronunciation official app. Learn everywhere.
Forvo is a great website for students learning any language. It’s a pronunciation dictionary. You can search a word or phrase, and hear recordings of English speakers from across the world saying it.
Here is the video from our lesson on Schwa this week
Have you ever thought about how they make those voices for Siri and Google? This is an interesting video if you have (B2 +).
Gerard Nolst Trenité - The Chaos (1922)
You might have seen this poem on my classroom wall. The title is meant to evoke the sort of problems that people learning English (and even plenty of native speakers) have with English pronunciation. Here’s a link to a recording of the poem - best heard with headphones, and not for the faint of heart!
When I teach English pronunciation, I try very hard to give students ‘rules’, which students often find in some way makes English pronunciation less confusing. This poem shows the exceptions. What a silly language we have!
Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! Just compare heart, hear and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word.
You can use the Symbol browser in Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or Apple Pages to find and insert IPA symbols, but it can be quite labourious. This neat little website lets you type, copy, and paste the symbols and transcriptions you need.
Sounding Right: Learning and teaching pronunciation
Here are the online resources from my session on Saturday at the annual FECEI conference in Madrid.
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B8VBBuLA4zKSY2tNakdBa3ctb1U&usp=sharing
Use this to practice the sounds of English
This page gives you the rules for word stress, with audio. Two simple rules and five more complicated rules for which syllable to stress in English. Pronunciation for ESL learners.
This is not a definitive list - for every rule in English there will always be an exception. BUT, this gives you a very good start.
English tongue twisters from the world's largest collection of tongue twisters.
Tongue Twisters are fun in any language, and they’re a great way to practice your pronunciation. This website contains over 500 different English twisters, each a great, funny (and sometimes dangerous!) way of rehearsing your articulation of different vowel and consonant sounds in English.
Sounds of Speech (English) mobile application. This site contains animations of the phonetic sounds of Spanish and English. Available for each consonant and vowel is an animated articulatory diagram, a step-by-step description, and video-audio of the sound spoken in context. It is intended for students of phonetics, linguistics, and foreign language. Recently added to help fund further development you may buy an Android or iPhone Mobile app for English Phonetic Sounds of Speech. Use this to help learn the sounds of English.
SOUNDS is a great App from Macmillan publishers. It comes with a fully interactive phonemic chart for you to practice listening to and producing the different sounds of English individually and in context with 650 high frequency words. There are also extra quizzes and practice activities. It works with iOS or Android, and best of all - it’s free! Just go to the App Store on your phone or tablet, download, and get practising!
Here’s an excerpt from a Fame Lab lecture by Monica Koperska from Poland. Have a listen to it. What do you understand? What words does she say differently to you or your teacher?
What should I listen to?
One of the most common requests I get from students these days is about listening: “where can I find English to listen to?”, “what’s the best way to improve my listening?”, and perhaps most common “where can I practice the listening exam?”
Common too, is this sentence when I ask students how their exam went: “yeah, it was OK, but the listening was impossible! You couldn’t hear a thing!”
Let’s take a moment to consider that last statement - “I couldn’t hear a thing.” Perhaps not the best reaction, I’ll follow this up with a little smirk and ask them why this was the case. That’s a lot more difficult for them to answer.
A few years ago, when we started to notice the current boom in demand for exams, you’d also start to hear claims that a computer-based exam was the better option. The favourite argument for this was that the listening paper could be done with headphones and so, logically, none of the extra noises or echos you’d naturally get when playing recorded speech in a room full of one hundred other students taking an exam. Incidentally, we haven’t seen any marked improvement of listening scores from students taking a computer based test with headphones.
But that is not the point I’m arguing here. Rather, I think we as teacher are doing our students a disservice by giving them a pin-drop quiet classroom with crisp loud audio to practice their listening skills. For one thing, when they find themselves outside that strictly controlled environment they can struggle. But for another, it’s not genuine.
An activity I like to run with a class is something that might break a teacher-trainer’s heart. “Let’s do some listening,” I’ll say. “Just listen, and then write down what they said.” No warmer, no idea generation, no gist activity. All of these are hugely important and valuable stages in building up students’ confidence to listen. But once in a while it’s fun to test what they hear. And they end up hearing a lot more than you or they might imagine.
Returning to that first question: what should I listen to? The more I think about this, the more I’m erring on the side of youtube. TED talks and the International Fame Lab are two great developments in recent years. Experts and individuals passionate about various subjects give a short videoed lecture. You’ll get neuroscientists discussing how language is learned (apparently, neuroscience is a very new science), you’ll get over excited Americans discussing space and make you want to throw up, and next in the playlist is that famous 11 year old girl that makes adults reconsider their place. And inbetween all of those are non-native speakers speaking fluently in a difficult accent and making tons of ‘mistakes’. THIS is what you should be listening to. Our students are far more likely to have to use their language to engage and interract with fellow L2 English speakers than they would L1 English speakers.
So in a final answer to the question: find someone speaking in English about something. Listen. What do you hear? What do you understand? And, if your students are interested in pronounciation: what do they say that’s the same as how you say it, different to how you say it, and maybe different to how your teacher says it? Maybe this is a pronunciation mistake. Maybe it’s just another way of saying it - but if you can understand them, then what does it matter?
Folder
I have answers to the listening activity on accents. Please ask for these next time if you want one
The Owl