MacMillan English Campus

We are very excited to share with you amazing news! Sounds: The Pronunciation App has been shortlisted for the ELTons 2012 in the category Innovation in Learner Resources.

The ELTons (British Council Innovation Awards) is run by the British Council and sponsored by Cambridge ESOL and are now in their tenth year.

As Valentine’s approaches it’s time to resurrect our Blended MEC Valentine’s poetry competition. Last year we asked you to get your students to write variations on the ‘Roses are red, Violets are blue…’ poem format, using it to deliver some untimely bad news. You can build on this by

We all talk about a voice recognition tool and how useful it is or could be for our students. The very first voice recognition tool was created in the 50s and it had a device to recognize individual spoken units. The times have changed and so has the device, nowadays it

A few months ago we introduced you to the free version of Sounds: The Pronunciation App. You can find more about it in the post: What’s your phone got to do with Adrian Underhill? The app spread like wildfire, both teachers and students have been thrilled about the new

As Eva wrote last week, the English love to queue. A fortnight ago it was for Wimbledon; last week it was for the best-selling book and film franchise, Harry Potter. Last Thursday, London’s Trafalgar Square was awash with children and adults of all ages, queuing to see the première

A lot!

Macmillan launched a glorious new app to help students, teachers and teacher trainees practise everything related to pronouncing the sounds of English. Watch Joanna firing questions at Matt Kay about Macmillan’s new and brilliant Sounds app:

With the Sounds app you have phonetic sounds and example words literally at your finger

Surfing the web recently, I came across a few interesting games, tools and activities to help students improve their spelling, vocabulary and use of English. Here are some activities that offer some useful practice your students might enjoy:

Spelling bees

Spelling bees have been popular in the United States for decades and there

John Wells’ phonetics blog is heaven for anyone who is a phonetics buff. As you can imagine, a blog that’s ‘Everything to do with phonetics’ and written by a phonetics expert can get a bit intense, but if you love phonetics you’ll be coming back for more.

The blog has

If your students love playing the ship or sheep game, they’ll love this site. It would be great to use on an IWB if you have one (and will save you from doing all the modelling all the time). Alternatively, send it to your students as a Web Link

Pronunciation is crucial for the ability to “perform” in a foreign language. If your English sounds native, you are much more likely to be judged as an advanced English speaker. Teach your students how to observe and provide them with a skill set to imitate English vowel and consonant sounds, sentence

If your students struggle with pronunciation or you find it hard to explain how to produce certain sounds in English, then you might find this site useful.

It’s from the university of Iowa website and, although it’s only available in American English (and Spanish), it’s a

MEC Trainer, Joanna Trzmielewska, writes:

Pronunciation is a very important aspect while learning a new language. However, very often students see pronunciation classes as boring and not very useful. If you want to encourage your student to practise pronunciation and show them how important it is, I recommend

MEC and onestopenglish Assistant, Giulia Merlo, writes:

One of the most curious and unique aspects of London’s linguistic culture is the Cockney Rhyming Slang: not properly a dialect, but more than just a set of fixed expressions, it consists in substituting a word with an expression that rhymes

MEC and onestopenglish Assistant, Giulia Merlo, writes:

The Spelling Bee is a competition in which students, usually children, are challenged to spell some of the most difficult English words correctly. It originated in the United States, where it still takes place today as the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a