"Pronunciation Bites" and I

I first conceived Pronunciation Bites at least three years ago. At the time I was teaching Phonetics at College already, but I also had a considerable number of periods at secondary school, and I was determined to find a more systematic and effective way of integrating pronunciation work in my lessons (not that I had not tried before, but things didn't work out too well!). Time constraints, institutional requirements, discipline issues, an apparent lack of interest on the part of students, and my own lack of confidence were always on the way.

As it generally happens, during a long journey back home (I used to commute 1 hr 45 min to work at the time), I just went "Eureka"!. I got my yearly plan, took a look at the grammar and vocabulary contents I was expected to teach for my CAE class, and started deciding on "companion pronunciation features" to those topics.

I first came up with the obvious (looking back, quite a difficult topic to teach, given the clusters which gave my students so much trouble...):

Review of simple past --> past regular verbs --> -ed suffix.
Review of present simple --> 3rd person singular suffixes --> (e)s suffix 

And then I got more creative, and thought of....

Grammatical emphasis: pseudo-clefts and inversion --> issues of tonality and tonicity
Causative structures--> tonicity (noun often accented when expressing urgency or present relevance!)
Expression of regret --> contracted forms of "should've", use of the fall rise for many conditioning clauses (3rd conditional)

So little by little, notions of stress and accent, intonation patterns and consonant clusters became part of my classes, and an important part of grading and assessment, too. 

And so the pronunciation+grammar/vocab+grammar list grew! And these notes, ideas, moments of epiphany, as it were, are now presented as snippets, and pictures, and stickers, and coloured notes in my Evernote app in my phone and tablet, as well as on an Evernote-compatible paper notebook:

However, my inquisitive mind thinks that taking notes and ideas is not enough. I need to supplement this with theory and reflection. And I guess this has always been on my mind, but it became more of a purpose, or a project, a month ago.

Last April I had the chance of taking part in the wonderful IATEFL conference, in Harrogate. And on the very last day, almost by chance, I got into a room where a talk was taking place. It was by Anthony Gaughan, and it was related to professional development, and to how we do not need to travel a long distance to actually engage in it. The text of the talk is available HERE, and I guess it was a perfect way to finish the conference for me, as I definitely need to revisit some of my beliefs and long-established assumptions. So this blog is, to a certain extent, a way of addressing this uneasiness I felt after the talk.

So just like my pocket notebook, this is what Pronunciation Bites is meant to be, at least for me. A place to take down those "Eureka" moments before, during and after lessons, with a touch of theory to shed light and a rationale onto them. An excuse to do further reading on the pronunciation topics that interest me and share them with whoever is willing to hear about them and comment on them as well. A spot to lay bare those ideas and thoughts and reflections which shape my teaching, which is always on the move, always evolving, always growing stronger from mistakes.

Welcome to Pronunciation Bites.