Pronunciation with Wlodek Barbosa

I'm not certain how you see the title of this blogpost on your screens... With three Polish-accented letters it may be quite a challenge to your graphics card :-). I was recently asked about this strange name of the city in central Poland (in which I'm going to have a plenary presentation on Second Life pronunciation teaching in exactly three weeks, BTW). Below is part of my answer, with a snapshot of the this word from John Wells's pronunciation dictionary. Hope this helps (or vice versa :-)… Continue

What a great session! With ten students (including three new ones) it was both exciting and challenging... We did two exercises on phrase stress prepared by two teams as homework: (i) in one similarly stressed phrases had to paired in a list of two dozen, (ii) in the other a phrase with a given stress pattern had to be found in a sentence typed in chat and pronounced by players. Both activities were rather challenging, especially to the newcomers, but quite interesting and fruitful at the same t… Continue

Last night in our pronunciation session we first had a spontaneous discussion on learner accents, their needs and learning aims. Some students said that without a native-like accent it might be hard to communicate in a foreign language; some others said that as long as the communication can be carried out, the accent does not matter so much. These two positions have been hotly debated by language teaching theorists and practitioners, with opinions divided and more research produced in this area… Continue

Dear pronunciation students,

Kip has laid out some drop boxes, as promised, to help him cover some of the costs of running Virtlantis. Everybody can drop as much as they choose to, of course, and there's no limit of donations :-). This scheme is completely independent of our Wednesday sessions of pronunciation, however. As I've declared a number of times, these will remain free forever. I've also promised to pass on to Kip (via the drop box method) any funds you may choose to pay me (by paying… Continue

Last Wednesday (4th Nov) we did two activities, both notecard-based:

1. 30 non-compound heteroaccentual homographs: a list of thirty words of two syllables each. They can all be stressed on the first or second syllable, with the accompanying difference in grammatical category, meaning and pronunciation. Sometimes the difference is simple to grasp: ['accent] is a noun, while [ac'cent] is a verb, but they mean the same thing: "to place stress on something". Sometimes the difference is more subtle… Continue