Word stress puzzles

Level: lower levels. From A 1 to B1

Melon Maze from Hancock Mcdonald Page

Procedure:   

• Students work in pairs.
• Project maze grid on board
• Students say the words aloud  to decide the path that allows them to get through the maze

Football Maze from Hancock Macdonald Page

Materials:

• Projector 
• Totally necessary : Mazes to project (you can make some photocopies if projector is not available)
• There are two mazes: melon maze and football maze. Depending on the first word of  the maze.  
• Not necessary but a plus : Recording of words

Go to  Handcock Mcdonald´s  page to download the mazes, project them  on board and start playing:

http://hancockmcdonald.com/materials/melon-maze 

Do you want to view a list of word that most Spanish speakers mispronounce? Click HERE

Thanks to Carmen Santamaria Pena for sharing these materials at the 2016 British Council Barcelona Teacher-s meeting  

Elllo Listening Site. Listen, read the script (if needed) and take the quiz

Elllo stands for English Lesson Listening Library. It  is a short video site or slide share site  where students can listen to  and view short videos/presentations. There is a script for the texts you hear and the recordings are pretty clear. When you finish listening you can just do the listening quiz.

LEVEL:  Lower intermediate or upper 

Warning:  It might be difficult to find the audios  you like as the web is a bit chaotic and you seem to need either the number of the video or the name of the  series to which it belongs. 

This is the link to the site: HERE

See the links to the videos I have chosen  for you below but feel free to browse around!

 
These are some of the examples you may like:

a. Trip to Cambodia:  Julia tells us about a memorable trip in Cambodia to raise money for a charity. .It includes the audio and a slide presentation of her trip as well as the script, vocabulary and quiz. There are 4 presentation on the same subject.

Click HERE





b. Take a peek at the section  "Talking Points"
My suggestion:

• TAKE THE QUIZ
• LISTEN 
• TAKE THE QUIZ AGAIN
• CHECK THE SCRIPT IF YOU FEEL YOU NEED TO

These are the Talking points I liked: 

b.1. American cities  HERE. 
b.2. Best movies ever HERE
b.3. Different jobs the speaker (Todd)  has had HERE

To access the Talking Point series, click HERE


Thanks to my colleagues at the Training British Council Course 2013 for recommending this site.

Pronunciation: How do you pronounce...?

"How you say" is an on-line tool that will help you to learn how to pronounce words.
Aim: students introduce words they do not know how to pronounce in order to learn them with the sound Suggested procedure if you want to use this tool in your class

•  make a list of the words students mispronounce.
  
• group students in teams
• write the words on the board
• ask teams (in turns)  how a word is pronounced
• check the pronunciation by introducing the  in How j say
• give a point to the team that pronounces the word correctly

Access the HOWJSAY page by clicking HERE 

IF your students are Spanish speakers, you may start with some (or all) of these words:

• Problems with "I" or "AI" sound:  to determine, idea, opposite, to  examine, horizon, since, microphone,  to print, tiger.
• Problems with stress pattern:  successful,  component (stress in "po"), foreigner (FO), surface, insurance, hotel, interesting, invalid (IN)
• Words with two stress patterns: to present/ a present, to report/a report, to progress/ the progress, to address/ an address...
• The "able" words: vegetable, suitable (the "i" does not sound), able, comfortable, table, capable, removable, printable 
• Letter B  does not sound: debt, plumber, doubt
• Letter W does not sound:  sword,  answer, drawer. would
• Other silent letters: mayor (no "y"), heir (no h), guard (no u), shepherd (no second h)
• The -es ending sounding as "iz"or "is". Most student ignore the ending: services, oranges, he fixes/watches, exercises
•  The ones they always get wrong:  biscuit (the "u" does not sound), receipt, recipe, architecture (the K), busy, , key, Pharaoh, choir, aisle,rare, archive (K), corps  /kɔː/ as in Peace Corps vs. corpse.
• The ones that are very similar to Spanish words and students pronounce in the Spanish: fashion: Jamaica, Arkansas, Zanzibar, Ottawa.Lancaster, Asia, Trafalgar (FA), predator (PRE), cigarrette (TT), controversy (TRO), transparent (PA)
• The ones with less syllables than we expect: chocolate, digital, restaurant,  basically
• Teasers (homophones or almost homophones): flour and flower,  guerrilla and gorilla, waist and  waste, pear and pair, heir and hair, write and right, four and for, hear and  here, no and know...  For more homophones in British English go to this page HERE
• -age words: beverages (also stress pattern), village, image, message, usage 
• The - ure words: nature, creature, future, structure, adventure, literature 

Phonemic Chart with Examples.

Listen to Adrian Underhill's talk (1hour) on how to teach pronunciation and use his chart (posted below) to teach your students how to recognize phonemic symbols and improve their pronunciation.
 

If you have Flashplayer and sound you can use:

•  the MacMillan interactive chart with sounds and examples of words  HERE  
• the  Onestop English,with sound and model words HERE
• the video  by the English Language Club I have embedded below. 

If sound or flash-player are not available, you can  project this chart:

 

If you need help to transcribe a word, I suggest you use this tool HERE 

English Language Club video

Thanks to Julian Jahanpour, speaker at the Barcelona 2012 British Council Workshops for providing me with these materials. 

Text to Phonetics

Text  to Phonetics is an online application that transcribes small English texts into broad phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) Click HERE to go to the Text to Phonetics page.

Autonomous learning.What does your presentation sound like?

The Autonomous learning label contains tasks that students can carry out on their own.

 Use a text to speech page to ensure the correct pronunciation of your speech.

Imtranslator: write your text and listen to it!

• Use any of the websites below
• Copy and paste excerpts of your speech into the window you'll on the right
• Choose speed, language (English) and avatar
• Listen and take notes 

Link to imtranslator  (see picture) page:  HERE  
Link to acapellla page: HERE  

Link to natural readers page:  HERE



Thanks to our teacher trainer Mike O'Neill for providing us with the link to  the natural readers page. Course 77 at the British Council Summer 2012.