eLearning Format
If you have been involved in eLearning for any length of time, you will undoubtedly have come across the term, microlearning.
Microlearning is a holistic approach to skill-based learning and education that deals with a topic in small learning units which are easy for the student to complete.
You can think of each microlearning lesson as the piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
Microlearning is the opposite of traditional learning where lessons are an hour or more long and which expect the student to absorb huge amounts of new information.
Microlearning Pronunciation
I have come to realise that English pronunciation is the perfect candidate for the microlearning format and have begun to create the lessons in the Britlish Library in this format.
I’ve read just about every English pronunciation book written for students and have found one overriding factor in all of them: a density of information that makes assimilation impossible.
What I have found from teaching my online students how to improve their pronunciation is that little and often is the best strategy.
Students don’t approach pronunciation with a tell-me-everything mindset. They normally come across a word or two which they are having difficulty with and want to know how to handle it correctly.
Microlearning Advantages
Microlearning allows me to select such words and explain how they are pronounced and how they work within utterances.
In this way, microlearning does not overload the student with information, but provides just enough for them to understand what they need to understand to improve their pronunciation.
With the same speech features occurring in many sentence structures, linking features such as linking J, linking W, linking R, and linking consonants are regularly presented and revised in each microlearning lesson.
Over time, all of the important speech features are covered and a student’s pronunciation improves markedly but in a holistic and natural way, much as a first language is acquired in childhood.
The more a student repeats and uses these speech features, the more likely it is that the speech features will become part of their long-term memory, able to be used spontaneously in daily speech.
If you really want to see and hear an improvement in your spoken English, you need the microlearning lessons from the Britlish Library.