Munawarunnisa Nazneen Saudi Gazette JEDDAH — The Master English Education and Training in affiliation with the London Teacher Training College, UK recently held a complete linguistic teaching skills course for all the ESL/ELT teachers and coordinators at the Movenpick Hotel here. The one-day intensive and assessment-based program included two certificates: teaching pronunciation and advanced phonetics in an interactive fun-filled session. For the first time in Saudi Arabia, the Master English Education and Training had partnered with "The English Club” to provide native English speaking skills, focusing heavily on imbibing American and British accents. The short and very practical course covered basic approaches, techniques and tips for improving the pronunciation, stress and intonation of students' and practical ideas on using pronunciation in their classrooms. The course included both the study of phonology, the sounds of a particular language, and phonetics, the sounds in language, and focusing on the practical usage of the phonetics in classroom. The course was delivered by Bushra Latif, a CELTA-certified teacher trainer with Master English Education and Training with over a decade of work experience teaching children and young adults. She has presented several conferences worldwide and is known for her fun-filled interactive workshop sessions. The workshop was interactive and included lots of activities. The participants were made to learn through various teaching methodologies including group work, pair work and individual work and humanistic theory, including articulations intonations, word stress and phonetics. The session stressed on the understanding of the concepts. The course was attended by various university lecturers and school teachers of various nationalities. The participants liked the session and showed great appreciation. Fauzia Al Ghamdi, an English Language Supervisor, said that the course is beneficial especially for teachers who teach phonetics. "They need to practice pronunciation before teaching it to the students." Mersiha Kovacevic, an English teacher at CISA, found the session to be excellent, creative, interactive and beneficial. Rzan Taleb of Macmillan Education and Heba M.Abdelwahed, an English Instructor in an English language institute, also found the workshop interactive. Maryam Khalid Hashmi, an English language teacher at Ecole Al Nawrass International said: “It was a creative and a very interactive workshop...precise and important points were touched." Jawahar Al-Mintafeh, an English instructor, said the workshop was great and appreciated that the trainer who demonstrated the material in an interesting manner using variety of techniques. After attending the intensive workshop, candidates were given home assessments with a deadline for submission. Grades will be issued after evaluating each candidates' works. A two-hour "Accent Training" course will also be held for those who wish to speak like native English speakers.
