If you speak with any ESL teacher long enough, a familiar pattern emerges:they know pronunciation matters, they want to teach it more confidently, yet they rarely feel equipped to do so. After seventeen years working in ELICOS as a pronunciation and fluency specialist — training hundreds of teachers in Australia and abroad, and developing several […]
How to Teach English Pronunciation Creatively (and Confidently) By Patrick Hayeck — Founder & Director of ESLAN, CEO of SCOTS English College Many teachers avoid pronunciation because they fear offending students or don’t know where to start. Here’s how to teach it creatively and confidently—and why it’s a moral obligation to help learners be understood. […]
Are you accidentally saying “estop” instead of stop? Or maybe “espanish” instead of Spanish? If so, don’t worry — you’re not alone. This pronunciation issue is especially common among Spanish speakers and learners whose first languages don’t allow words to begin with /s/ + consonant clusters, like st, sp, or sk. But the good news […]
Hey there, ESLAN Fan!Are you sick of translating from your first language word by word every time you speak English? Tired of feeling stuck, slow, or scared to open your mouth? I get it. I’ve been there—and it sucks. I know exactly what it feels like to be lost in conversation, to not understand what’s […]
Have you ever listened to native English speakers and thought their speech had a special rhythm — something musical? That’s because of sentence stress. Sentence stress is what gives English its rhythm. In every sentence, some words are stressed — said louder, longer, or higher — while others are spoken more softly or quickly. Learning […]
Watch the French President, Emmanual Macron make a speech in English and learn about some of the most common errors made by French people when they speak English. Consonant ‘h’ French speakers often have difficulty pronouncing the English consonant /h/ at the beginning of words because the /h/ sound is generally silent in French. As […]
Did you know that the letters ‘T’ and ‘D’ don’t always sound like /t/ or /d/ in native English speech? The way we pronounce them depends on the sounds that come before or after them. If you learn and apply the five pronunciation rules below, your spoken English will sound much more fluent and natural—especially […]
The Labor Party has now managed to preside over a country with the lowest living standards since 1959—an astonishing achievement in mismanagement. Let’s rewind to 13 January 2022, when the Liberal Party was still in power. COVID was still around, and Australia was experiencing a crippling labor shortage, particularly in hospitality and retail. The Liberal […]
Many of my students have problems with pronouncing the English vowels, and sometimes, it’s not much that they can’t pronounce them, but rather, it’s that they can’t tell the difference between 2 vowels that may sound close or similar. They may really struggle with distinguishing between minimal pairs such as ‘ship’ and ‘sheep’, ‘walk’ and […]
The Australian international education sector is under siege, and the fallout from Ministerial Direction 111 is devastating private education providers, particularly in the ELICOS (English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students) and VET sectors. But as many of you in the industry are aware, this crisis didn’t start with Direction 111—it goes back to […]