Students need a pronunciation model in class - and the traditional one excludes the vast majority of teachers. This is one great takeaway from our interview with the great Robin Walker and Gemma Archer. Their incredible book "Teaching English Pronunciation for a Global World" came out yesterday. Grab your copy here. We spoke with them at length about pronunciation teaching, flaws in the traditional model, and how a native speaker model holds many people back, teachers included. Students do need models, but the tape or audio from the coursebook isn't it - at least, not traditionally. In an increasingly international world, we should strive for our pronunciation teaching to be, well, internationally based. And this means intelligibility, or the intelligibility principle. As Robin told us: "The model is anybody whose own use of English for international communication has shown their pronunciation to be intelligible." The podcast interview comes out in March, but you don't have to wait that long to learn from Robin and Gemma. Their book is a fabulous resource. Do you focus on intelligibility with your learners? Are you familiar with the intelligibility principle?

Here's the recording of yesterday's Q&A call. See the calendar to see the day and time to attend the next one. Have a great week! 😎

#Part 2: An Introduction to Tense & Time thanks for reminding me of this short video. I've just shared it with some volunteer tutors who aren't trained at all, and I think this will help them get out of the strict grammar syllabus mindset that says tense is fixed, always.

Happy Halloween, all! In Canada we are moving our clocks forward an hour this upcoming weekend. The platform calendar auto-adjusts, but just something to keep in mind for the Q&A calls and live events for next week. The Q&A calls remain for 12pm Toronto time. Have a great day!

#Spoken Texts & Stress Great idea. I usually just use hand motions as @Catherine Angus does.