PronSIG PCE 2014

  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!

The Eve of IATEFL 2014

   My colleague and I have arrived here in the beautiful Harrogate. After 2 hours sleep due to excitement and an early morning flight, I'm ready for some rest before the TEFL-packed week ahead. This year marks my first year to experience the wondrous and inspiring IATEFL Annual Conference and to say that I'm excited, is an understatement. The prospect of learning, new discoveries and meeting ELT gods and goddesses has literally led me to sleep deprivation.
  Since downloading the Conference App last week, I have been searching and planning the next 5 days. It all begins tomorrow with the PCE (Pre-Conference Events). I have chosen PronSIG's (Pronunciation Special Interest Group), mainly because that is where my heart lies in ELT at the moment. For the last 6 months, I have been an administrator for the PronSIG's Facebook page, and I'm truly looking forward to meeting all the lovely people that I have gotten to know through posting and sharing ideas. The line-up is also something that I could not turn down, including, Wayne Rimmer, Alan Tonkyn, John Field, Robin Walker and Richard Cauldwell.
  Over the next few days, I hope to report my experience of each day at the conference, a type of journal if you will. It serves to give myself the opportunity to reflect, but also for those of you who can't make it to the conference in person or online, you can get a taste of it here.

To watch online, go to: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2014
Also follow on Twitter @iateflonline

Wishing everyone a happy IATEFL 2014!

Giving Elementary learners pronunciation confidence.

Last summer, I started teaching an advanced class. In the first lesson, we were doing a vocabulary exercise when one of the students had problems with the pronunciation of one of the phrases. Automatically, I turned to the IPA and broke down the word for him. It was successful and he was amazed. He asked me if we could look at the IPA in a little more detail as he had never seen it or been shown how to use phonemic script. I referred him to The Pronunciation App by Macmillan until the next class. When he came back the next day, he was so excited and said, "Why didn't anyone show me this when I first started learning English? It would have been so much easier." He went on to say that he could look up any word in the dictionary and could pronounce it using the script. We went on to look at other benefits of it too and how it helps when looking at suprasegmental features of pronunciation.
 A few months ago, I was moved to an Elementary class and made sure that I exposed these learners to the IPA and other aspects of pronunciation, of course. What I witnessed was wonderful and as a teacher, I felt like I had really done my job. Firstly, my Elems really enjoyed working on pronunciation, and as it was integrated throughout the lesson at all stages, it meant that they were always engaged. They would bounce out of the class repeating different expressions or sentences we had drilled throughout the lesson and would often come back into class with tales of different things they had heard in "the real world" that they could now understand. This made them especially excited as it demonstrated the relevance of what they were learning in class to real life.

So what did we do in class to become more confident in our pronunciation? Here are what I feel were the most important:

• Word stress - Any time new lexis is introduced, we counted the syllables and decided which was the strongest syllable. I like to count these on my fingers and I have the students hold up their hands too. Sometimes we would clap, soft and loud and on occasion we would stamp our feet. I feel that making it physical in this way makes it so much more memorable for the learners and engaging too.

• Weak and strong forms - When studying grammar, especially at a low level, the teacher builds the foundation for the learners. That's why it's vital to include pronunciation as part of your grammar lessons. One of the main things I like to introduce is weak forms and vowel reduction in sentences. So, for example:

                        I can SWIM -  /aɪkəˈswɪm/ - The vowel in can is reduced to a schwa /ə/
                        I CAN'T swim - /aɪˈkæntˌswɪm/ or /aɪˈkɑ:ntˌswɪm/ - The full vowel is present to    
                        emphasis that the verb is in the negative form.

• Drilling - Drilling can be a lot of fun, but also it really builds up the learners' confidence. If you drill as a whole class, it gives the students the opportunity practise their pronunciation in a sea of voices so they aren't afraid of being heard. As they become more confident in what you are drilling, you can reduced the numbers and drill in 3's or 2's which will give you the opportunity to monitor their progress. Sometimes I pick out nationalities or men versus women etc. However, drilling isn't just saying something had having the learners repeat it and then move on. You need to break down the sentence and then build it up by adding more and more until you have the complete sentence. You can do the same with words and breaking them into syllables. When you have built up the sentence or word, then drill smaller groups.

• Connected speech - Making your learners aware of features of connected speech will really help their receptive skills. Again, when you're introducing grammar, think about how you would say the sentence yourself if you were talking to colleagues or friends. For example:

          A cup of tea - A cuppa tea - /əˈkʌpəˌti:/

           Do you like swimming? - /ʤəˌlaɪkˈswɪmɪŋ/

• Use other students as models; this gives a real confidence boost. I work in a multilingual context, so I had a variety of L1's in the class. In this particular class there were Spanish speakers from Venezuela, Mexico and Spain, Portuguese speakers from Brazil, Turkish, Saudi and German. Each language group had different pronunciation difficulties, even the Spanish speakers from different countries had unique difficulties. At different stages, instead of me providing the model all of the time, I asked another student who was pronouncing effectively and had the other students listen and repeat. When the students had become comfortable with me drilling, I then had other students drill the rest of the class. There were two benefits to this. First, some weaker students in other skills grew in confidence as they could provide a good model of pronunciation for their peers. Other students realised that certain aspects of their pronunciation were attainable because if another student can do it, so can they.

• IPA - The IPA and phonemic script are incredibly valuable in assisting your learners with their pronunciation. It helps error correction, explaining word stress, weak forms and connected speech. I feel that it's an essential tool to be able to deal confidently with other areas of pronunciation. It's not necessary for your students to know the chart inside out, but it's something that you can build up over time to help them both in class and in their own autonomous learning.

Happy teaching everyone!