making students pronounce “-ed”

As a veteran English teacher I still struggle to understand what makes pronunciation of regular -ed difficult for Spanish speakers. I am not sure if this equally applies to speakers of other languages but it makes my ears bleed when a student reads or says “called” (phonemically transcripted as ” ‘kɔ:lɛd “). Why is that?Continue

teaching language chunks

I love the little and unexpected detours that one sometimes takes from the planned lesson that we have in our notebook or/and in mind. I also love the feeling of being totally prepared and very much looking forward to steering off the path and embrace a golden opportunity to: a. bring on a useful expressionContinue

mini dialogues

One of the keys to successful teaching is the ability to provide ample opportunities for recycling language in varied, original and engaging ways. A substantial number of activities from this blog deal with recycling language. In fact, speaking a language is nothing but reusing language. Here is one activity that you may enjoy trying outContinue

jungle speech and sentence stealer game

For today’s activity I would like to acknowledge the work of Gianfranco Conti on devising ways of providing drilling and repetition in various ways through games, dictations and translation exercises and, most notably, Richard Cauldwell’s groundbreaking work on phonology and on trying to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. Richard Cauldwell has done outstanding work on soundContinue