Teaching Harry Potter: Reading Aloud?

in Children, Literature, Pronunciation, Reading, Syllabus design, Teaching

Reading aloud in class is a topic that sparks plenty of debate among language teachers. While some see it as a cornerstone of developing fluency, others view it as unnecessary or even counterproductive for many learners. Personally, I believe reading aloud can be a valuable tool when used purposefully and with the right students, particularly those who will need to speak or present publicly in English. For other learners, while occasional practice can still be beneficial, it may not always be a central focus of your lessons. Here’s a closer look at the pros and cons of reading aloud, along with suggestions for how to use it effectively in your classroom. Read more

Teaching Harry Potter: Vocabulary Activities

in Children, Literature, Presentations, Pronunciation, Reading, Syllabus design, Vocabulary acquisition, Word creation

For B1-level students, the challenge lies in striking the right balance: ensuring the vocabulary is accessible but still engaging and new. Vocabulary activities should help students make connections between the text and their own language use, while also deepening their understanding of the story. Here are some ideas I’ve used to build vocabulary activities for B1 learners in my Harry Potter course. Read more

Songs for Learning English Grammar

in English Grammar, Listening, Pronunciation, Spoken Fluency, Teaching

I’m keen on the idea of songs helping students internalise, through repetition, the rhythm, sentence stress and grammatical structures or English. I don’t have much opportunity to use songs in most of my classes (mostly business, academic and exam classes at the moment) but am interested in the idea of encouraging students to use songs independently to practice shadowing, as one way of reviewing grammar structures. One advantage of using songs this way, with the lyrics available, is that the words of the songs don’t need to be quite as clear as they would if they were to be used to present structures and vocabulary. Read more

Poems for Business Classes

in Business English, Poetry, Presentations, Pronunciation, Rhetoric, Spoken Fluency

One common question asked throughout Adrian Underhill’s course was how could we adapt the activities for our more serious courses, the ones whose students tend to have very particular and definite aims in mind, such as Business English courses?

Poetry Festival

in Poetry, Pronunciation

Today we finished Adrian Underhill’s two-week course, ‘Pronunciation, Performance and Poetry‘. Everyone had a poem they’d chosen and had been working on over the last week, crafting the stress, pauses and intonation. One student, Lauretta, made a poster, found a performance background image and compered the event. Everyone performed. It was a beautiful way to finish the course. Read more

De-mystifying the Phonemic Chart

in Language Play, Pronunciation, Spoken Fluency, Teaching

When I started teaching the chart seemed practically incomprehensible to me. Even as I grew to understand it (and Adrian Underhill’s layout is the only one that seems to make sense) it felt like a great cognitive load to place on students (‘Think English spelling is hard? Now learn all these symbols!’). The DELTA, if anything, made it seem less accessible (unvoiced bilabial plosive, anyone?).

Adrian Underhill, though, strips all that away through use of gesture and mime, by focusing on the chart as a ‘geographical map’ of the mouth which helps locate the physical movements we make in production, using simple prepositions of place to describe movement. Read more

The Inner Voice

in Poetry, Presentations, Pronunciation, Reading, Teaching

This phrase has come up a few times recently in different contexts and it’s one I’m interested in: a language teacher, you’d be forgiven for presuming, would tend to concentrate on the ‘outer’ voice. Read more

This is just to say… William Carlos Williams

in Language Play, Poetry, Pronunciation, Reading

This Is Just To Say

By William Carlos Williams

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Performance: Humanizing the Classroom

in Poetry, Presentations, Pronunciation, Teaching

On this course with Adrian Underhill we are preparing a poetry festival for the last class. Each day we start each session with a poem read by Adrian or another student.

I confess when I first read this on the course description I was a little wary. I love poetry but was unsure about its place in the classroom. It appeared to me perhaps as a bit of a throwback to those 70s EFL texts I was so obsessed with when I started out as an idealistic 19 year old – Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrim’s, NLP in the classroom etc. All these years on I guess I’ve become more cynical and jaded.

Knowing and knowing

in Pronunciation

Two kinds of knowing:

‘Knowing’ as in a cognitive, intellectual knowledge.

And

‘Knowing’ as in ‘knowing in your bones’, ‘lived experience’ perhaps, or realization.

Adrian Underhill offers a neurological term: ‘proprioception’ to contrast with cognitive knowing in pronunciation. Proprioception is a perception and awareness of the position and movement of the body. This kind of knowing we can only learn from physical practice. And it is this kind of knowing which will release a learner from the habits of the L1. Read more