It seems only yesterday that we wrote a post to celebrate our first birthday. And in fact, it WAS only yesterday that our blog had its second birthday!*
We didn’t make a cake this year, but we have been exceptionally busy with other things. If you’re just discovering this blog now, here’s a quick summary of what you missed in 2015.
Blogging!
Naturally, throughout the year, we’ve been blogging to share more practical ideas for ELF-aware classrooms. Click the links below to read about:
- How to prepare young learners for a school exchange by raising their awareness of the main differences between their own accents and the accents they might hear, as well as building their confidence when interrupting and asking for clarification in the event of not understanding someone
- How to respond to parents when they ask: “Does my child have good pronunciation?”
- A practical lesson idea for studying Chinese New Year with young learners in the Year of the Goat
- A short series of posts about the Learning English Video Project, which features videos of students and teachers from around the world (Brazil, China, Spain, Romania, Morocco, America, and the UK) talking about their experiences of learning English
- A video of a classroom student-student dictation activity, which teachers can use to analyse their students’ needs according to ELF pronunciation priorities
- A guest post elsewhere: 10 top tips for teaching pronunciation (the first 5 tips and the second 5 tips)
Events
February: ELFpron appears in the EnglishAgenda podcast
This podcast by the British Council featured ELFpron’s own Katy Simpson, talking about how to deal with pronunciation in class from an ELF perspective. You can listen to the podcast via this link, or by clicking the play button below:
April: IATEFL Annual Conference in Manchester, UK
Laura Patsko gave two practical workshops, one at the PronSIG’s Pre-Conference Event on ‘How to identify pronunciation priorities in the multilingual classroom’ and one in the main conference programme, about helping learners develop their understanding of different L2 accents of English. You can find slides and handouts from both of these workshops in this post-IATEFL blog post.
April (again!): BELTA Day in Brussels, Belgium
Laura gave a presentation on ‘Teaching pronunciation and listening for English as a lingua franca’. You can watch the pre-conference trailer for this presentation on YouTube or below (visible on some devices):
June: ETp Live! in Brighton, UK
Laura repeated her IATEFL PCE workshop on identifying priorities for pronunciation work in a multilngual classroom. You can find the slides and handouts in this blog post.
November: teacher training webinar on helping learners listen to different accents
Laura gave a webinar for Cambridge English Teacher, sharing the practical ideas which are described in this related blog post. You can watch a recording of this webinar on YouTube, or below (visible on some devices):
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Wow! What a year it has been. See you in 2016!
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*What a lovely opportunity to see the meaningful placement of nuclear stress in action…
ELF Pronunciation 