It just keeps getting easier to do this stuff.

http://www.wtt.org.uk/index.html

This website lets you set up free transcription teaching classes.

I think you might want to give it a go if you are an EFL teacher trainer...



Logging on as a student is straightforward. I will leave a transcription for you to do if you want to try it.

The world is spinning faster and faster.

Horrigan's Colour Coded Phonemic Chart for NEW TEACHERS

This is especially for the new teachers starting at the CES's ACELS Teacher Training Course this month.

Anne-Marie one of the teacher trainers knew of this simple way to associate those new IPA phonemic vowel symbols. The idea is actually an IH teacher's proposal (Margaret Horrigan) and here it is in a nutshell.


It's easier for our brains to associate to colours instead of to symbols, so let's associate each symbol with a unique colour.

So the æ which looks like a lower case ˈaˈ and a lower case ˈeˈ smashed together are associated with a colour instead of just a word like 'rat' or 'clap'. Ideally each symbol is memorized just with the sound it represents, but this is difficult in practice for beginners who have to learn these 20 symbols in about 24 hours. Horrigan's idea is to use the colour black to remember /æ/. It's the vowel sound in the word. So you recognise the colour on the field behind the symbol and as you say it you hear your example. This is simple and instinctive and it works across quite a few accents quickly.


Go through her PowerPoint presentation here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km15zMlFnnY


Thanks Anne Marie!

Adrian Underhill's Interactive Phonemic Chart

This is great and simple.

It may be enough to kill this blog.

http://www.onestopenglish.com/section_flash.asp?catid=60030&docid=156649

It's been nice knowing you.

............

I love Adrian Underhill who is of course the author of Sound Foundations one of the most helpful books for teaching teachers and students about how their mouths work and how pronunciation classes work.

This won't put him or us out of business. This will just make teaching English a hell of a lot easier when you have the internet in the classroom. Having a great resource doesn't make better teachers but it does learning to be a better English student and learning to be a better English teacher much easier.

And that's the whole point, isn't it?

On RP and how I think it probably doesn't matter anymore

If we are going to deal with using "phonetics" in the language classroom we are going to have to put to rest a few things about the International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA, don't worry) always bothered me like:

• Reason for the ambiguity between vowel sounds: the organic nature of the mouth.
• Reason why the dictionary’s pronunciation is never going to be like yours: it describes someone else’s accent.
• Reason why the owner of that voice probably doesn’t like that description of their pronunciation: it has been unsuccessfully “dumbed-down” so that we- non-experts- can appreciate it.
• Reason why it is so complex: it was intended to describe every sound possibly made by the human mouth and can clearly show how accents physically come about
• Reason why RP -received pronunciation- was chosen as the international model accent: it wasn't.

100 years ago RP, or something like RP, was described and studied first. It may have been the best English accent for clear communication then... according to now-dead people... who were technically amatuers... who lived in England... and who could afford to study languages... and travel... 100 years ago... But that is not an altogether great reason for my 9 o'clock on Monday.

RP is a "makey-uppey" accent and it IS dying out. It doesn’t threaten you. It doesn’t threaten me. It is DYING OUT. The accent is described (here in this school) in loads of dictionaries, but it needn't be prescribed to your students any more than my accent should. Yours and mine are not international standard accents. I don't think there will be an actual European/international standard in the future, but I don’t believe there is one right now.

There are clear accents and difficult ones. There are ones where most all English speakers can understand you without asking for repetition and one which require lots of tolerance and smiling and nodding.

Your average native English speaker can make themselves understood to other English speakers if they want to wherever they are from. RP is an accent which is fairly understandable, let's not quibble.

The sounds needed to make a good approximation of RP, an understandable English accent, have been passed down, adjusted and come described most learners’ dictionaries. I want us to enable the learner to approach the dictionary confidently for meaning and use of a word but for its pronunciation as well. This creates more competent learners and gives them the full value for the price of that fun colourful little book.