Let us talk about my personal nightmare: Phonetics

I thought that this resource could be missing; but, much to my surprise it is still working. It belongs to Iowa University and its name is "Phonetics Flash Animation Project". Its porpuse is to show phonetics theory from a different perspective, by using animations in order to ilustrate the way we produce the sounds in a language ( American English, Spanish and German are available), making the experience of learning phonetics less boring and more dynamic and enjoyable.

Phonetics

I must thank to them for providing us such tool, in my personal experience it help me a lot during my Phonetics courses, now I will spread the voice for everyone to use it.


Merry Xmas to all!

If you want it you get it

Here, there is one of the best sites related to PDF documents you can find on the Internet, not only for English books, but also for any other category, take a peek, probably you could find what you were looking for. English books SLA: an introductory course

Surfing on the Internet: resources at your fingertips. Just click them!

How many times have you been looking for something important but no matter how much you try, you could not find it?

Surfing on the Internet in search of teaching material is not a different matter, sometimes it's very hard to find specific or detailed information, indeed, sometimes you did not find anything about you were looking for.

This is the aim of this blog, gathering as much information as possible about any topic related to English language teaching. For instance, I really apreciate the effort that the developer of the following website puts on his site dedicated to roleplay conversations:

roleplay conversations

If you have more related sites please help me to gather as much as we can, it is my aim to make this site better for you all.

Sharing your experiences

I am always wondering about the best way to teach, it is hard to deal with a lot of people who have different ways to learn and even so as teachers we have to design a program that can satisfy the necessities of the whole group. That is the main porpouse of this blog, here, we can express and share your ideas and experiences about what are the bests estrategies on ELT

Let us go step by step

Grettings friends, this will be the first class, which is focused on the basis of sounds. Let us make a distinction on what do we mean when we talk about sounds. As we know Spanish is quite different from English in this aspect. We call "phoneme" to one of a small set of speech sounds that are distinguished by the speakers of a particular language. Acording to this, Spanish has 22 phonemes without including the allophones. This information can be checked and explained better on the following links:

Fonemas
transcripción fonética del español con el IPA

In contrast, standard English has 44 phonemes (vowels and consonants are included)

Phoneme
english Phonemes

As you can see those differences are important at the moment you start studying either English or Spanish as well. Although this blog is designed for teachers or ELT/EFL students anyone can used it as they wish, just take into account that the information here is a bit advanced for beginners, so they will have to do a research in order to understand this information.

My first step

Well, I must say that I am not the most dedicated student in the world, but at least I am always producing ideas about teaching, and I am proud of that. I have called this entry "My first step" because I never have created a blog dedicated to this topic, in fact, this is my first blog.

I will apreciate all the help you can provide me in order to improve this blog. This is not an ambitious project, it is just a way to spread our collective knowledge.



Sincerely yours,


Stevenson