I don't often spring out of bed at 6.30am, my friend the snooze button usually helps me get a few extra minutes sleep. This morning was different. When I opened my eyes and realised where I was, I quite simply . . .sprang! The prospect of spending the day with other pronunciation nerds was truly thrilling!
As we made our way to the conference centre, the excitement continued to rise and we could see many other delegates flocking to the main entrance who would later be revealed by their badges and red conference canvas bags.
On arriving through the main door, we were politely guided to the end of the queue for registration. We quickly got to the top and collected our badges and went to collect our conference programme and welcome packs. It was then time to make our way to the Bramham Room to begin our day of pronunciation.
The title of the PCE (Pre-Conference Event) was, "Integrating pronunciation into your teaching". And so it began, with a few introductions and a lovely welcome from the SIG's coordinator, Wayne Rimmer.
Alan Tonkyn started the proceedings with his talk entitled, "What makes for perceptions of fluency in L2 speech?" After exploring the connection between pronunciation and fluency, Alan defined fluency and expand on the types. He discussed how assessors perceive pronunciation and fluency, many then went on to talk about what fluency advice we can give our learners, including, time-gaining, reformulating, pausing, and speed.
Next up, was Wayne Rimmer who highlight the need for a pronunciation syllabus, due to the neglect of pronunciation teaching in many classrooms. He puts this down to poor training, being bogged down with meta language, a lack of confidence on behalf of teachers and poor curriculum design. Most course books are driven by a grammar syllabus and pronunciation, if any, is tagged on to the end of grammar. In order to change this and for our learners to gain more confidence in pronunciation, we need to give our teachers the confidence and tools. To do this, we should provide teachers with a pronunciation syllabus.
After a coffee break, it was John Field's turn to take centre stage. His focus was on listening skills and how phonological features are key for learner to make sense of streams of speech. He acknowledged that knowing a word is very different from recognising that word in a chunk of language in a stream of speech. He reinforced the idea that in order to help our learners, we have to expose them to natural spontaneous speech.
It was then lunch time, which we spent in the lovely Harrogate sunshine outside the conference centre. Following a packed lunch provided by the centre, we waddled back to the Bramham Room to prepare for Robin Walker's wonderful talk on helping learner deal with accents. He highlighted the importance of awakening students to the fact that there is such a huge variety of accents, both native and non-native. He discussed how phonological features are the best tools to use with learners to improve their receptive skills. Most importantly, however, is that we have to expose our learners to a variety of different accents to aid them in their survival outside the classroom.
Last, but by no means least, was Richard Cauldwell, who believes that it's the teacher's goal to help their learners understand fast, messy, authentic speech. In order to describe the process of how teachers can do this, he used 3 metaphors: The Greenhouse, where everything is segregated and in its citation or complete form; the Garden, where things begin to mix and we can identify different features of connected speech; and finally, the Jungle, where everything is . . .mushy. In order to help our learners, we must bring them on a journey from the greenhouse, through the garden, to the jungle.
Many travelled long distances (Argentina, Russia and New Zealand to name a few) to join this inspiring day which demonstrated the importance of pronunciation and bringing to the fore, the importance of the role of pronunciation in developing our learners' listening skills.
I'm off now to make my final decisions about what talks and workshops, which, let me tell you, is not an easy task. So many amazing things to choose from!
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