venerdì 21 novembre 2014

Where The Chart comes from






AC Gimson
The internet says AC Gimson






The Chart and the IPA are two vastly different things.  Calling the OUP 'pronunciation chart or even the mighty Adrian Underill's chart the 'IPA' is as cringe-worthy misplacing an apostrophe. Its' very annoying, isn't it?

Copyright with OUP-note they don't refer to this as the IPA. It's a 'pronunciation chart'

Copyright to Adrian Underhill. This is not an IPA chart. These symbols are meant to be very flexible. 'Phonological' might work but just for RP. Saying this covers all English accents is requires quite a bit of descriptive flexibility. Gimson wouldn't have stood for that kind of slipperiness. 

This blog started as a Grail Diary of sorts about that Chart above. Recently I was given the opportunity of writing for a small readership in Ireland by Peter Lahiff of ELT Ireland's writing group. They are putting together a publication called ELT Ireland Bulletin. Look out for it early next year. In my reading I ran into this wonderful little story by Geoff Lindsey about AC Gimson and Peter Roach and our favourite ELT classroom artifact.




sabato 12 aprile 2014

The Judy Gilbert Hour



This woman is not a drunken grandmother- she is my new pronunciation crush.  When I wrote about Adrian Underhill late last week I saw this video on that marvelous little suggestion selection at the end of every YouTube video.

sabato 15 febbraio 2014

"If I had a hammer..."

4 very good teachers are in a rough-and-ready city centre school. They are all going to use the Computer Lab for their Upper-Intermediate/Advanced groups. The advantages are manifold. They know it. They're going to share it in rotation.

This is a pronunciation blog, so...
What could they do with access to every extant website?

My suggestions would be these:
  1. ask students for their favourite websites for learning English (and make a list)
  2. ask students for YouTube examples of different accents and dialects from their own languages 
  3. work through a list of good pronunciation resources for learners
  4. use YouTube for listenings for pronunciation noticing instead of content
  5. 'timecapsule' their students's English pronunciation by making videos of them now
Regarding Number Three... what are your top favourites?


If I had a group of English language learners who wanted to learn more about pronunciation, I'd show them these to get the whole IPA chart thing out of the way and show them how they could work a bit more autonomously.