Pronunciation, Poems and Storytelling: From Phonemes to Fluency
Gain essential skills to teach English pronunciation across a range of contexts with world-famous ELT specialist, Adrian Underhill.
From phonemes to fluency
The aim of this workshop is to bring life and pleasure to all language work by enabling students to speak from the heart and express themselves with confidence, clarity, personal engagement and joy. You will experience the same thing yourself!
Course overview
On this course, you will:
- Learn how your mouth, breath, voice and sound production work – from the inside, not just from theory
- Embark on a full workout using the Sound Foundations phonemic chart, and daily peer teaching practice to gain confidence, receive feedback, and personalise a range of new teaching techniques
- Gain concrete and usable insight into different pronunciation features and how they affect learners’ ability to comprehend and use English
- Experience and practise a new generation of techniques and strategies for improving your students’ pronunciation, self expression, and joy in learning
- Gain confidence in teaching those aspects of English pronunciation that make the difference, with any coursebook, at any level and any age
- Develop presence and confidence in spoken performance
- Share ideas with teachers from around the world and build your own international teaching support network
Course summary
Through continuous activities and reflection we will explore phonemes, how to join them to make words and impart stress and unstress, use of pausing, speed and the relevant performance features of connected speech. We will go beyond connected speech to explore comfortable intelligibility, self-expression, speaking from the heart and enabling learners to find their voice in the world.
We will make daily use of poems as small but complete performance pieces since the rhythmic basis of verse is the same as that of conversation. Any small sequence of verse could be a bit of conversation, and vice versa. This will culminate in a class poetry festival at the end of week 1. We will extend this during week 2 to longer chunks of language and speaking without a text, using stories and storytelling techniques leading to a class story festival at the end of week 2. Such performance pieces draw every aspect of the course together into a lived and memorable experience. Poems and stories are provided and no previous experience is necessary. Other aspects of presentation and spontaneous speaking will be included.
Underlying all this will be the exploration of the physicality of pronunciation. By sensing our pronunciation muscles, by knowing from the inside how we make, join and energise the sounds in our own mouths, we become more versatile in the ways we can guide our students, helping to free them from the ‘grip’ of mother tongue pronunciation. Such physical experiencing can assist learning and recall across all language learning and all 4 skills. You will work on your own pronunciation as we go, developing the clarity, engagement and beauty of your spoken English and experiencing a range of teaching techniques for developing the same with your students.
Who is this course for?
This course is ideal for teachers, academic managers, director of studies, teacher trainers and materials writers, who are interested in improving their teaching of pronunciation skills or want to develop their use of storytelling as a learning tool. Participants must have a language level of Upper Intermediate (B2), at a minimum.
Topics covered:
Each course we run is tailored by our expert tutors to the professional needs and priorities of the participants so content may be adapted to best suit the needs of your group.
- Pronunciation at level of sounds, words and connected speech
- Sound Foundations phonemic chart
- Rhythmic aspects of poetry as a parallel to conversational rhythm
- Traditional storytelling
- On-the-spot improvisation
- Presentation skills
- Spontaneous speaking skills
- Self expression and speaking from the heart
- Continuous professional development
About Adrian Underhill
Adrian is a world-renowned ELT Consultant and Teacher Trainer, author and the series editor of the Macmillan Books for Teachers. He is well known for his book Sound Foundations and his inspiring talks and training courses on how to understand and use the phonemic chart. Adrian takes a holistic approach to teaching and teacher training and is a frequent conference speaker.
Dates & locations
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Teaching Content And Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
2 weeks
14 July - 25 July 2025
28 July - 8 August 2025
