I sometimes hear from DipTESOL trainees who are finding it hard to get to grips with phonology. Common problems include:
DipTESOL
Pronunciation priorities
Uh-oh! Here comes a ‘Teacher Pete thinking something through out loud’ moment. Tut. I hate these… Mark Hancock shared a good article on LinkedIn the other day called ‘Pronunciation Teaching Post-ELF’. It’s got me thinking about my own attitudes towards… Read More ›
Acoustic blur, soundshapes, speech streams
I’ve been thinking about an interaction I had in class last week. I’ve transcribed it roughly below. For a bit of context, the language point was going to for future plans, and the language had been presented through a listening…. Read More ›
Subject knowledge, jargon, learners
This is a post aimed at candidates about to take a diploma course, but is still relevant to all. It also loosely connects to Sandy’s recent post about mistakes you’ve made in class (click here).
DipTESOL: introduction to the phonemic chart
This is an introductory session on the phonemic chart for trainees taking the DipTESOL. I’ve designed this to supplement input given via distance learning courses, to be run in-house. It’s meant to help trainees give a basic explanation of the… Read More ›
General ideas for teaching pronunciation
(This is a follow-up to my post on phonology-based activities. I’m sharing it now because some of our teachers are about to begin training for the Trinity DipTESOL. Phonology/pronunciation features quite a bit on that course, so I want to… Read More ›
My TEFL articles
I’ve just uploaded a few of my articles to Scribd. Hopefully I’ll have more to add in the future… Click here for advice on writing for ELT magazines. Here’s an article I wrote in July 2015 for ETp on error correction…. Read More ›
Q+A: Reading and listening texts for DipTESOL teaching practice
Someone contacted me on this blog asking a question about the DipTESOL. Q: Where/how did you find good listening and reading materials for the teaching practice? My answer: a) I recorded my own b) I sourced authentic materials on the… Read More ›
A rant about comprehension questions
On my module in materials development we’ve just looked at reading and listening tasks. We spoke about what makes good/bad comprehension questions. ‘Plain sense’ questions are seen as pretty ineffective, as they just test familiarity with sentence structure rather than… Read More ›
DipTESOL Phonology Interview
There are some useful resources online the DipTESOL phonology interview. You can find two great overviews about it from Gemma Lunn and Dave Dodgson. Both mention the example videos by Oxford TEFL, which I think are done by the tutors… Read More ›
ELT Planning 