Teaching by video.

I was really impressed by this video.



She demonstrates great understanding and control and that grounds her lesson.  It's specific and very fast but because it's directed at a targeted group of students, Koreans who have trouble with /f/, it works.  Also the learner leads because they pause and repeat bits at will, instead of pretending that the teacher is omniscient.

This is another great reason for teachers to run class blogs.  Good learners really do find the good resources and if you can start them started you start a virtuous circle for your school and its future learners.

I've been thinking this a lot recently: books are not the best  pronunciation resources.  Multimedia is the only way to teach this stuff.  Build a set of resources you can share with your learners.

Good luck.

To teach the IPA Phonology or NOT

It's the old debate: Is teaching the IPA chart worthwhile in English Language teaching? I think everyone teaching nowadays should have a good handle on what is in the use of the IPA for a student who wants to really participate in spoken English. So many teachers don't want their students to be their peers. They simply don't believe in their students or their own abilities. In the end a teacher can keep their students "in their place" with incomplete pronunciation work. It's just not fair to tell show them everything but how to use their mouths to communicate. It's not communicative. That's my opinion, of course. Where do you stand?

SNACK Sound Toolkit

http://www.speech.kth.se/snack/

This is another whopper like PRAAT.  This one was developed at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm.

So SIT then.

It's cool and cheap and does the job.  This is like the IKEA of speech tools.  Maybe too high-level though. Let's see:

The Snack Sound Toolkit is designed to be used with a scripting language such as Tcl/Tk or Python. Using Snack you can create powerful multi-platform audio applications with just a few lines of code. Snack has commands for basic sound handling, such as playback, recording, file and socket I/O. Snack also provides primitives for sound visualization, e.g. waveforms and spectrograms. It was developed mainly to handle digital recordings of speech, but is just as useful for general audio. Snack has also successfully been applied to other one-dimensional signals.
The combination of Snack and a scripting language makes it possible to create sound tools and applications with a minimum of effort. This is due to the rapid development nature of scripting languages. As a bonus you get an application that is cross-platform from start. It is also easy to integrate Snack based applications with existing sound analysis software.

Yep.  Bit beyond me.  But this is the new goal: technology-literate teachers who also work outside of universities.

ELSTA as a start to a PLN

If you teach a language in Dublin and work with a school you should know about these guys or should I say girls.

They are the English Language Support Teachers Association here in Ireland.  Their membership appears to include teachers of Spanish and German here in Ireland as well as English Language Support and the occasional EFL teacher (me) and UCC's Séamas Kirkpatrick.  There seem to be a lot of links to TCD amongst the Exec group.  

I suppose the main reasons to join groups like this are to find out where you live and to find good resources.  But the best resources are always going to be people.  Despite my love for multimedia, hanging out with sharp people is one of life's great pleasures. 

They'll be having another conference in Dublin on the 15th of October.  If you come along and read their site first you'll be finding a whole lot of other people who are into what you do. And iron sharpens iron.  This is what my grandmother said years ago.  Personal Learning Networks is the more recent buzz word for it.  

These don't just have to be physical.  Twitter really can work for a for you in finding resources and materials and advice from working teachers like ourselves and the people who write our materials.  Loads of authors use it to stay in contact and keep sharp.  If you aren't using it try it for a month following the people on the list in this site on PLNs.    

I think you'll be glad you did.

FluenCi and why it will succeed abroad... and maybe here.

If you are worth your salt as an English teacher you know that our alphabet is a minefield of confusion for learners who are trying to use it to speak the language.  Many, who have roughly phonetic alphabets (1 symbol=1 sound), are disappointed to find that our alphabet is crammed with the wonders of English history and this crowds out their current study of pronunciation.

As teachers recognize that opportunity and do our creative best to make some space for them to work.

We separate the written from the spoken as quickly as possible.  We show that the letters very often act as a guide to probabilities, not absolutes.  We teach them new sounds and concepts showing them techniques and frameworks that are helpful in analyzing any spoken language.  That's what FluenCi will help us and them do as well.  I hope for it's success. I'm a fan. Check it out and get in touch with Digital Media Centre at DIT to use FluenCi.  I'll be doing it for my school.

FluenCi involves putting lots of cool technology and a seven step process which may well be the first step towards teaching the kind of fluency you hear between native speakers in conversation, dialogic fluency.  It's only been in research books and reality but never in the course books or digital sources.

I can't wait to try it out.

Now...

Everything that FluenCi can do can be done by a teacher.   Though, the teacher would have to have a fanatical interest in speech science and huge faith in their learners potential to believe that their work alone could fight the current of current practice of sidelining students pronunciation needs.  And a whole lot of time.  It could happen if schools had everything Gavin Dudeney prioritizes for schools: wifi, data projectors, training and support (see the last two minutes).

To be as good as FluenCi might become, a teacher might also have to be a native speaker of the learners' language ...and that's why I think this product will do best abroad with a strengthening group of teachers, who are connected via technology and the language, accessing research and sharing advances in technologies and media.  Where is this place?  It will be in Dublin if we can stop being embarrassed by optimism.  Let's connect here.  This is an amazing time to be a teacher.

-the end

******

The conference was hosted by the Ireland's English Language Support teachers' organisation called ELSTA.

PDFs of the presentation should be ready in a couple of weeks and I will post a link here when they are available on the ELSTA website.

Dermot Campbell presented at Drumcondra Education Centre on behalf of the DMC with Yi Wang and Marty Meinardi. 

Palatography for the People

I read in David Crystal's tome on Language about palatography.  It's when you measure the pressure on your palate.  So when you say an "S" where is your tongue touching?  My tongue doesn't usually touch the back of my two front teeth when I say the D in "dollars," but Tony Soprano's henchmen do.  I know this because I listen for tongue placement.  I connect it to the sounds that get made by my EFL students. I don't attribute their sounds to their nationality I attribute it to the physics and I think I'm a really cool speech scientist because I have made this one connection.

I usually make it my goal to convert my students and fellow teachers to observing these things.  Convincing them is sometimes more difficult than it should be.  But I'm a great communicator, so I can do it.  I've always wanted to demonstrate that tongue placement is key to consonant production especially those liquids and sibilants.  Palatography is something that I could access in the university setting of speech analysis or processing but as Ailbhe Ní Chasaide says- You're still trying to get people to talk- we're trying to get computers to talk.  So most of the very expensive equipment, so popular once, is now gathering dust, I'll bet.  And as usual anything that is not being taught well to people is being or has been taught well to computers.  Some brilliant programmers have brought Speech Analysis (arguably one of the most important issues in one-to-one EFL lessons) to the people through accessible technology. And it was about time.

http://www.visualspeechtherapy.com/index.php/Site/Features

http://www.enablemart.com/CompleteSpeech


Obviously this is for a different profession (Speech and Language Pathologists) but the majority of my "problem" learners just need to believe that their issue is physical in order to give them a workable solution.  They generally have no motor problems just socio-cultural identity issues.  (And we can quash those with some good old-fashioned science)

I want one of these SmartPalate things.  It appears that there are two different companies, but it's the same product.  This will speed learning about how your mouth works, by taking the "if you just imagine" moments out.

But it's expensive!  Three thousand is a lot more than a copy of English Pronunciation in Use.  That will have to come down.  The cost of fitting each student will doubtless take the price out of Part-Time EFL Teacher range and into Hereditary Lord of London Solicitor range. ( Maybe I can find a starving dentist who will fit these for a lower price... )

If I set up an accent reduction practice it will be based around using this.  If your school has one, it could turn it into a very small but unique revenue stream.  Expect to see phonological charts popping up as "can-do checklists" in hoity-toity schools in 300 days or less.

Special Note
*I also look forward to seeing how this tech is accepted by SLPs.  It will be a good predictor of how EFL teachers will react to things like ExamSpeak and EnglishCentral as they go mainstream in the learner's world.

Resources which can bring the learning to the learner without the teacher:  A teacher may see the advantage for the learner as revolutionary. But inevitably they will feel their own craft of explaining those things which were difficult to observe (or value) slightly less needed in a world which seemed as if it could never have changed.

I kind of feel that now.  ...I feel like a lighthouse in a GPS world...

Wow. Emotional nonsense at its best.  Guess who quit smoking this week.

An excellent canon of online phonetics resources

I'm just looking at these resources from some guy in Washington called George Dillon.
It's essentially ClearCommunication.blogspot.com but again better organized.

Check it out. I'll be on it for a month.

Also if you check see his main page (just backspace through everything to the backslash) there's loads more.  Very interesting stuff.

Well I'll probably and reporting back on each thing and gushing thing again.

...

That said I've mentioned half of them before, but tell me if you see something cool. This almost makes me want to post what I'VE made. Almost...

Here's the link again: http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/