Teaching Pronunciation

I read an interesting blog post at Critical Mass ELT: Reflections on the World of English Language Teaching entitled It's all in the accent: Being critical how you teach pronunciation that focused on the issues that surround teaching pronunciation.  The author discussed accent prejudice and whose pronuncation students should seek to imitate.  This interests me as I have students with marked accents and some of them struggle to imitate the local regional accent.  Although I think that pronunciation is important for communication as I often have difficulty understanding students who have accents that differ from mine, I also think that accents are part of our identity.  I need to contemplate and discuss with my students the importance of pronunciation in communication but at the same time respect the fact that there are is not only one standard for pronunciation.

EFL Classsom 2.0

I recently joined EFL Classroom 2.0 on Ning.   It is a good resource for EFL or ESL teachers because it has lesson suggestions that it is entitled Lesson in a Can.  Moreover, it has an ongoing forum in which members can post questions and await responses some of which deals with lesson planning. The URL is http://eflclassroom.ning.com/index.php

Reaction to videos

I viewed two videos this evening Social Media Revolution 2 (May 5,2010)and Did You Know? (June 22,2007) that document the prevalence of computers in people's lives today.  What interested me at first was that although these videos were published less than 3 years apart, the latter, Social Media Revolution 2 showed how Facebook had replaced MySpace as the leading internet socializing tool.  These two videos may have been intended for different audiences but I was struck how much glossier and high tech the more recent one was.  I was also struck by the sense of urgency in Did You Know?  It seemed to be a rallying cry to America to get with the tech or risk losing our national status. 

Thirteen years ago when I was teaching Renaissance Lit in  a Boston high school classroom, I made an analogy between the invention of the printing press and the internet.  As the internet was still in it's relative infancy, the students had some difficulties conjecturing how it might affect their lives.  As those who have studied the history of English or those who have read wikipedia's entry on the printing press know:
 
In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication which permanently altered the structure of society: The relatively unrestricted circulation of information and (revolutionary) ideas transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation and threatened the power of political and religious authorities; the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class. Across Europe, the increasing cultural self-awareness of its peoples led to the rise of proto-nationalism, accelerated by the flowering of the European vernacular languages to the detriment of Latin's status as lingua franca.<sup>[10] 
(courteousy of Wikipedia -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_Press accessed 9/16/10) 

I cannot foresee the future but I think it would be interesting to know what people and children did before they spent so much time on computers, phones and Ipods.  I think that the internet and technology will have a vast effect on social relations but hesitate to say for the better or worse.  I also think that the internet more than anything makes it necessary for teachers to teach critical reading skills as some people believe everything in print.</sup>