Radical English is all about new and better ways to teach/learn English. I'm happy to announce the launch of a new YouTube channel for English is Stupid, Students are Not on how to teach speaking. Whether you are a teacher or student you'll find this FREE 18 video series useful. Enjoy.
Please direct any questions you may have about the videos or the system to:
judy@thompsonlanguagecenter.com

Pronunciation Made Easy (for short) was "born" as an e-dictionary due to the encouragement of my dear Radical friends in November 2012 when we met f2f for the first time in England. Thank you all! :-)

It's based on a very simple strategy that occurred to me in class one day in Jan. 2003: using Portuguese sounds to help students pronounce English words. As Judy Thompson puts it, it's a strategy that "bridges the L1 and L2". Absolutely!

It's a different approach to pronunciation that was tried and tested in class with hundreds of students and worked wonders. The students were amazed at how easy it was and how well it worked.

It's an e-book, because the idea is for it to be just a click or a touch away from any Portuguese-speaking learner of English that needs help with pronunciation.

Teresa A. d'Eca

I finally got a chance to watch the video post below by Teresa Almeida D'Eca, about the TedTalk video 'The Birth of a Word'. Thanks Teresa, for sharing it with us...it's remarkable. 
It has special implications for me because I'm a pronunciation teacher. I'm always interested in how speech and language develops in L1 and L2 (first languages and second languages). Dr. Roy is an MIT researcher who studied his child's first words and created 3-D "wordscapes" illustrating the connection between the evolution of his speech and his environment. Dr. Roy discovered there is a tight feedback loop and a kind of scaffolding that takes place just before his son formed each of his new words coherently. 
What does this mean for pronunciation teachers? Well, it matches what I've learned teaching student after student in one2one courses: Instruction works best when students are allowed to experiment making new sounds and get immediate feedback on their successes and failures. After all, how can they know if their sound is meaningful or not without feedback! And scaffolding breaks the goal down into smaller segments, so students can become aware of them, learn to recognize them, work on them, and control them, step by step. 
We have a lot to learn from babies! Scroll down to Teresa's post and watch this fascinating study and it's implications for how we communicate socially (and how we can improve pronunciation teaching).

How's that for alliteration?  I've just published the first of a series of guidebooks on teaching American English pronunciation.  This one, American English for Arabic Speakers: A Guide to Pronunciation, compares Arabic and English vowel systems, word stress and intonation patterns, and shares techniques to help Arabic students master the American English sound.  It's available on Amazon.com as an e-book.

At Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers have been studying how spoken language is processed in the brain.  They conclude that the brain doesn't create rules that later organize spoken language; instead the brain continually looks for associations with already-known sounds, and links the new speech sound to those.  

Since our brains are intaking information at a phenomenal rate during ages 4-8 (more than at any other time in our lives), any sounds we hear or say later will be matched up with those pre-existing ones.  And since our first language doesn't have all possible sounds, we change L2 sounds (that don't have existing associations) into L1 sounds.

As Radical English teachers, we've known this for such a long time that it's strange to see it lauded as a "new discovery".  It seems we have to wait for "science" to "research" it and "prove" what radical teachers already know, that language learners learn best when we teach patterns, not rules! http://bit.ly/1nlaOGk