NATESOL Annual Conference

NATESOL Annual Conference

Saturday 18th May 2013

SalfordCityCollege - Walkden Campus

Salford, Greater Manchester.

‘Sounds Interesting: innovative approaches to the teaching of the spoken language in second language learning’

Programme

Plenary 1 (9.30-10.30)

Adrian Underhill: ‘Pronunciation, the Cinderella of ELT, and the two princes….’

We talk about integrating pronunciation into language learning and teaching, but the fact remains that in teacher training and in materials development pronunciation is the outsider of the language systems, and has been so for perhaps 50 years. I will explore two underlying reasons for its prolonged outsider status, and propose and describe a practical solution for each, accompanying each with participatory demonstrations, questions and discussion.

Adrian is a freelance ELT consultant and trainer, working mainly on staff training, leadership and organisational development. He is series editor of the Macmillan Books for Teachers, author of Sound Foundations and the prize wining app Sounds. His current interests include the ‘post-heroic’ approaches to leadership that are now emerging, applications of complexity theory to learning, and improvisation in teaching.

Parallel Session 1A (10.40-11.25)

Adrian Underhill: ‘Understanding and using the phonemic chart’ (Workshop)

This workshop will offer experiential, hands-on insight into a method that aims to liberate learners from the ‘grip’ of their mother tongue phonetic set by enabling them to rediscover and reconnect with the muscles that make the pronunciation difference. You will see how the phonemic chart offers a mental map of the territory to be explored, how it relates to finding the sounds in your mouth, and thus how to help learners do the same. And since there can be no syllabus of sounds as they are all needed from the first moment, the sounds are presented as a single gestalt, rather than as a never ending sequence of new sounds, stretching over months. The workshop will demystify phonology, making it engaging, usable and hopefully, unforgettable.

Parallel Session 1B (10.40-11.25)

Annie McDonald: ‘Teaching listening with authentic audio texts’ (Workshop)

In this workshop, we’ll analyse some challenges non-expert listeners face when listening to authentic texts. We’ll try out and discuss some classroom activities which have been designed to mediate the inherent difficulty level of such texts. These activities can help our learners become more effective, confident and autonomous listeners. They are appropriate for learners from level B1 upwards.

Annie has been involved in English language teaching for 25+ years. She has worked in EFL/ESP in Turkey, Brazil, England and Spain, teaching secondary and university students. She holds an MSc in Teaching English from AstonUniversity, and is a former president of TESOL-Spain. She co-authored Pen Pictures, a 3-level writing course for young learners, and English Result, a 4-level general English course for adults, both with Mark Hancock (OUP).

Parallel Session 2A (11.45-12.30)

Mark Hancock: ‘Pronunciation for listeners: making sense of connected speech’ (Interactive talk)

Pronunciation is just as important for listening as for speaking. In this session, we will look at what features make connected speech difficult to follow. We will try out a series of tasks and games for raising awareness of these features. Finally, I will suggest how teachers can prepare their own micro-listening activities.

Mark Hancock has taught English since 1984 in Sudan, Turkey, Brazil and Spain. His books on pronunciation include 'Pronunciation Games' (CUP 1995) and 'English Pronunciation in Use' (CUP 2003, 2012)

Parallel Session 2B (11.45-12.30)

Karenne Sylvester: ‘Let's talk about TED’ (Talk)

TED ( stands for Technology, Entertainment & Design. The non-profit website's mission is to spread ideas and, as a result, hosts thousands of different lectures from outstanding leaders in hundreds of specialised fields of interest. Due to the global nature of the talks given it offers access to a variety of different accents of English. Videos from this website also present themselves as the perfect tool to take into the ESL classroom because they naturally provide authentic and topical texts. Additionally, as the nature of the topics is often highly engaging, this presents opportunities for active discussions and explorations of critical thinking with teen and adult learners. In this talk, Karenne will discuss some of the videos she has used in class and present the benefits of using TED. She will also be showing you how to choose videos according to your students' needs, interests and attention spans, or even just to support a coursebook-based theme. Finally, she will suggest at least 10 very simple and practical ideas that can help you easily create accompanying speaking activities, based on the videos, for your own language learners in class tomorrow.

Karenne Sylvester is the edu-blogger behind the internationally recognized and award-winning ELT blog, Kalinago English (). She is an EdTech teacher-trainer and EFL teacher who has lived and taught English all over the world. Karenne currently resides in Manchester while completing her MA in Educational Technology and TESOL.

Plenary 2 (14.00-15.00)

Peter Watkins: ‘From practice to theory: teaching speaking’

The talk will follow the following structure.

- A brief overview of what speaking involves (discourse features, grammar, lexis, pronunciation, awareness of genre, pragmatics and culture) and the need to integrate these knowledge bases while under extreme time pressure.

- An overview of the key principles of teaching speaking, including its place in different ELT methods and approaches, and looking at a recent model of speaking instruction (Goh and Burns, 2012).

- The need for teachers to understand and theorize from their own practice (as teachers are seen as professionals who make autonomous decisions in their classrooms).

- Examples of speaking material and analyses of the beliefs that underpin them. This serves two purposes. First, it will make the talk quite practical and offer classroom ideas that teachers can take away and second it is a way of theorizing from the (potential) practice represented in the material.

- A brief summary of what has been said, packaged into a potential teacher development session (allowing participants to share the material in their own institutions with colleagues unable to attend the Conference).

- Questions.

Peter is a Principal Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Portsmouth, contributing to the MA in Applied linguistics and TESOL in particular. He has been involved in teacher education for many years, including both pre-service and in-service programmes and his main research interests relate to teacher education and teacher education materials writing. His publications includeCambridge English Teacher: Vocabulary and Pronunciation(CUP, 2012). The CELTA Course Trainee BookandThe CELTA Course Trainer’s Manual(both co-authored with Scott Thornbury, CUP, 2007),Learning to Teach English(Delta Publishing, 2005) andEssential English(Astrel, 2002). He has also contributed frequently to English Teaching Professional and is a contributing editor for ELT World Online, a journal published by the NationalUniversity of Singapore.

Parallel Session 3A (15.10-15.55)

Piers Messum: ‘The problem with pronunciation, and the solution’ (Talk)

With tongue-in-cheek, Tom McArthur defined pronunciation as “that part of a student which is the same at the end of a language course as at the beginning.” He couldn’t have said this about the other language skills, but the teaching of pronunciation is, indeed, rather unsuccessful, not only in ESOL but in all types of classes. The basic problem is that we have not understood how pronunciation is learnt, either by L2 learners or by children learning L1 (from whom we think we have taken our pedagogical cues). Taking English as an example, we’ve identified its phonetic features – the inventory of speech sounds, the ‘rhythm’ of the language, the ‘lengths’ of vowels, and so on – and then assumed that children learn these features through imitation. If that’s how they did it, then we’ve assumed that L2 learners, too, will succeed by ‘listen and repeat’ ... but, as we know, they don’t. In fact, a child doesn’t learn any of the things I’ve listed, or a whole lot more of the things that characterise English pronunciation, through imitation. Instead, they emerge as the outcome of children doing things themselves with quite different motivations than achieving a particular phonetic effect, helped by caregivers who (without knowing it) respond in ways that provide the learning environment they need. What the child does determine is the outcomes, but the outcomes are not being aimed at directly. There’s some very good news in this: the things that children learning L1 actually do are teachable in our L2 classrooms and students then do improve their pronunciation. I will specifically demonstrate (1) how we can provide the right environment for L2 learners to master speech sounds and (2) how we can teach the actions that underlie stress and reduction so that the outcome is authentic.

Piers first taught English in Japan in the 1980s and has since taught in France and the UK. In 2007 he completed a PhD at the Department of Phonetics at UCL on “The role of imitation in learning to pronounce”, an investigation of how young children learn to pronounce L1. He is now continuing his academic research, teaching ESOL in London and, together with Roslyn Young, trying to change the way that English pronunciation is taught. He was the author, with Roslyn, of a book on Gattegno’s pedagogy called “How we learn and how we should be taught”, is on the committee of IATEFL’s Pronunciation SIG, and regularly writes for their newsletter, “Speak Out!”.

Parallel Session 3B (15.10-15.55)

Richard Cauldwell: ‘Playing with soundshapes: dynamic activities for teaching listening’ (Interactive talk)

The acquisition of listening lags behind acquisition of the other skills. One learner gives us a hint as to why this is so:

I believe I need to learn what the word sounds like when it is used in the sentence. Because sometimes when a familiar word is used in a sentence, I couldn't catch it. Maybe it changes somewhere when it is used in a sentence. (Goh 1997: 366)

The speech that learners encounter outside the classroom contains words which can occur in a wide variety of soundshapes, even in the speech of one speaker. I shall present and demonstrate a variety of low- and high-tech activities to improve learners’ familiarity with the variable soundshapes of words in the stream of speech. The high-tech will include an iPad application (Cauldwell, 2012). Low-tech activities will include a variety of vocal gymnastics modelled by the teacher and performed by students. Participants will leave the session with new ideas to explore for their own professional development, and activities to experiment with immediately in the classroom.

Richard Cauldwell has taught English in France, Hong Kong, Japan, and the UK. He studied with David Brazil at the University of Birmingham, where he also taught international students for eleven years. Since 2001 he has been designing and publishing electronic materials for listening and pronunciation. His first publication Streaming Speech: Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English won a British Council Innovations in ELT award in 2004. His recent publication Cool Speech (an iPad app) has been shortlisted for an ELTon in 2013.

Panel Discussion & Closing Remarks (16.15-17.00)

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