Session 5A

Dafne Araya Campos - ABILITY English

Title: Empowering your Students through the Gift of Intelligibility.

Abstract
Following the success of previous presentations at UECA PD Fest, 2013 and the English Australia Conference, 2013, this workshop will aim to provide teachers with clear and succinct explanations on how to instruct on pronunciation essentials.
Past presentations have focused on the main aspects of pronunciation, they have provided numerous fail safe activities as well as demonstrated several ways in which new activities may be developed. This year, in direct response to feedback from teaching professionals, the aim is to facilitate a practical workshop which will focus on training the ‘teacher ear’ on identifying common pronunciation mistakes. Participants will listen to actual student recordings from varied backgrounds in a pronunciation class and will be asked to identify the sound mistakes. The rationale behind the prioritization process of correcting certain sounds before others will be explored. This will be followed by numerous demonstrations of techniques used to provide correction. The use of mouth models will be introduced and training with the International Phonetic Alphabet will be provided.
In line with this year’s theme of internationalisation and in the interest of providing professional development for teachers by teachers, this workshop will aim to demonstrate some useful sound correction techniques which translate across all nationalities found in the EFL classroom. Additionally, it hopes to help professionals discover their own, innate native speaker knowledge and assist them in trusting that knowledge to provide them with the confidence to tackle an all-important but seemingly elusive aspect of language learning, that of pronunciation.

Bio data:

Dafne Araya Campos has enjoyed many roles in the EFL industry. From an EFL teacher to specializing in pronunciation and becoming a pronunciation teacher and later the Pronunciation Coordinator at her college. She later took the role of Teacher Coordinator and is now part of the Education Management team at Ability English.
Dafne has an undergraduate in the field of languages, a Master in Applied Linguistics and is currently pursuing studies in the field of Psychology. Being a non-native English speaker herself, Dafne’s interests have remained in the fields of second language acquisition and the psychology of learning. Dafne has taken the role of delegate and speaker/presenter at past industry conferences including: 2012 EA conference - Sydney, 2013 UECA PD Fest - Sydney, 2013 EA conference – Perth