Video transcript
Do you feel nervous about teaching pronunciation? Maybe you avoid it all together? Maybe you think it’s important, but you just don’t know where to start apart from i-say-you-say? If this is you, keep watching.
I’m Jo Gakonga – I’m a teacher educator, MA TESOL tutor, CELTA trainer and assessor, online course designer and I’ve got a website at ELT-Training.com where I make material for teachers at all stages of their careers. If you feel nervous about teaching pronunciation, or you’re simply keen to improve your teaching in this area, let me tell you a bit about my new course Teaching Pronunciation Made Easy.
The course is designed to take you from zero to pronunciation teacher hero. I’ll give you some background about pronunciation- how does it work in English- why do some learners have trouble (not only with production but with hearing other speakers and understanding). Should we teach pronunciation at all, and what’s it worth focusing on? We’ll look at different aspects of pronunciation – sounds and how to use the phonemic chart, connected speech, stress and intonation. Knowledge is power and all this will make you feel more confident in the classroom.
As well as having a solid foundation, the course also includes lots of practical activities and ideas that you can use to integrate pronunciation work into all of your teaching.
I’ve been teaching a long time and my experience is that learning more gives me (in Julian Edge’s words) Roots and wings- What do I mean by that? Roots to feel a firmer foundation – more confident that I won’t get knocked off course in the classroom by a rogue question, or even more than that, just a feeling that I DO know what I’m talking about.
And wings- to fly- to experiment- to try new things and play with new ideas and be able to reflect on the results in a principled way. These are the things I’ve kept in mind when I was developing the course and I think you’re going to find the whole thing fascinating!
There are a lot of great resources out there for teaching pronunciation (and I’ll give you a library of links to those, too) but it can be helpful to have things in one place, and know that this covers all the basics and more. That’s what I’ve put together in Teaching Pronunciation Made Easy and I hope you’ll enjoy learning all about it with me.
