"Radical phonology"

"Radical phonology"

Are you tired of jazz chants and bored of meaningless minimal pairs and drilling?

Would you like to develop learners' confidence in their pronunciation and let them practice with meaningful phrases that could even change society?

Lesson one:

Choose one of the "Ready lessons" or "Quizzes" (see left) from this wiki to get learners interested in some of the global justice topics, or let them choose some Easier English articles to read and discuss.

Then tell them they are going to have a protest march around the classroom / school? to raise awareness about the issue. They can make banners, but need to chant very clearly so others can understand their message.

Learners, in groups, can extract key words to create their own chants.

Or you can suggest some chants to work on eg. "Equality for Women" "End Slavery Now" "No More Fracking" "Stop Wasting Food"

Make a short video of the learners saying some of these chants as your starting point.

Now work on the pronunciation of the chants, to make them as clear as possible:

a) work on individual sounds eg. contrast "women" and "woman", work on consonant clusters in "slavery" "fracking", work on particular phonemes your learners have problems with

b) work on utterance stress and intonation eg. the weak form of "for" in "Equality for Women",