Symphony of Science
This wonderful video is not just a joy to ponder… It also shows perfectly, by engineering natural speech into song, how rhythmic English is, and how speakers of English in the UK, US and Down Under will stress the content words and separate what they say into phrases. This is something that my students from […]
Mind Your Language
I’m revising for the phonology orals now, trying to focus on typical areas that learners with different mother tongues need to work on. Had some fun with this. I was wondering whether it was offensive, but have come down on the side of funny. As one reviewer puts it “Yes, they were stereotypes, and it […]
Pronunciation of words
Part 1: Individual words In English, words are rarely pronounced the way they are spelled. Here, an online teacher, Melanie (American), provides short video lessons, between 4 and 10 minutes each, contrasting and comparing words that many speakers of other languages find difficult in English. Video 1: said, suit, clothes, recipe, mountain, famous, virus Video […]
Stress and Intonation
These are the videos I posted on the Moodle site for students, for self-study in intonation. All are by the same online teacher, who does a really fabulous job, taking learners into the world of stress patterns with practice sentences like this: Clients get haircuts. Clients will get haircuts. His clients will get haircuts. His […]
Teaching pronunciation using jazz chants
Carol Graham trains teachers how to use jazz chants to teach pronunciation. They’re great energizers and get learners speaking faster than they can think – one of the elements of fluency. I’ll be doing some jazz chants in the telephoning part of a compact course next week, first giving them some jazz chant minis (see […]
Trouble with your empharsis
Hat tip to Nik Peachey. A nice little video to introduce reluctant learners to the usefulness of pronunciation practice, isn’t it? I’d ask students to rank the speakers according to whom they’d have most trouble communicating with.
