English stuff, Kiwi stuff, Colombian stuff, lot´s of stuff
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Friday, January 29, 2016
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Monday, January 25, 2016
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Saturday, January 23, 2016
Daily bread 01/23/2016
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- The main features of the Lingua Franca Core are…
• All the consonants are important except for ‘th’ sounds as in ‘thin’ and ‘this’.
• Consonant clusters are important at the beginning and in the middle of words. For example, the cluster in the word ‘string’ cannot be simplified to ‘sting’ or ‘tring’ and remain intelligible.
• The contrast between long and short vowels is important. For example, the difference between the vowel sounds in ‘sit’ and seat’.
• Nuclear (or tonic) stress is also essential. This is the stress on the most important word (or syllable) in a group of words. For example, there is a difference in meaning between ‘My son uses a computer’ which is a neutral statement of fact and ‘My SON uses a computer’, where there is an added meaning (such as that another person known to the speaker and listener does not use a computer). - On the other hand, many other items which are regularly taught on English pronunciation courses appear not to be essential for intelligibility in EIL interactions. These are…
• The ‘th’ sounds (see above).
• Vowel quality, that is, the difference between vowel sounds where length is not involved, e.g. a German speaker may pronounce the ‘e’ in the word ‘chess’ more like an ‘a’ as in the word ‘cat’.
• Weak forms such as the words ‘to’, ‘of’ and ‘from’ whose vowels are often pronounced as schwa instead of with their full quality.
• Other features of connected speech such as assimilation (where the final sound of a word alters to make it more like the first sound of the next word, so that, e.g. ‘red paint’ becomes ‘reb paint’.
• Word stress.
• Pitch movement.
• Stress timing.
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Short and Practical Pronunciation Teaching Ideas | Hancock McDonald ELT
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Pronunciation as a Listening Skill (TESOL France) | Hancock McDonald ELT
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Take a hike on the wild side of Cundinamarca | The City Paper Bogotá
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Colombia: How do I tell my daughter I was raped? | International Committee of the Red Cross
Friday, January 22, 2016
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Daily bread 01/21/2016
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What's the pronunciation? | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC
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Bottom-up decoding: listening | Oxford University Press
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English is often described as a particularly difficult language to understand in this respect, as
(a) the sounds we hear don’t always correspond to what we think is the spelling
(b) certain sounds change when spoken quickly and/or in groups of words. In the example above, the schwa sound at the start of “opposed” could be spelt as an O or an A, and the /d/ sound at the end of “opposed” gets lost (elided?) in the following /t/ sound
(c) it is sometimes difficult to work out where one word ends and another starts, as in “I scream/ice cream”.
- Firstly, learners need to be made aware of these features – in my experience, even high level learners may be unconscious of them. Features might include: connected speech, including weak forms, elision, assimilation and so on; the use of reference words like it and this to refer back to something mentioned previously (very difficult even for advanced learners); the use of stress to carry meaning (as in “I didn’t want to GO” vs “I DIDN’T want to go”); interpreting auxiliary verbs (“Where did you live?” Vs “Where do you live?”)
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Teachers often feel that the practice of these features helps in awareness-building. That is, if the learners try saying these forms (even if they do not wish or need their own pronunciation to reach “native-speaker” level), they are likely to be in a better position to recognise them.
Secondly, learners need to work on the best strategies for successful listening. For example, it is very important for learners to understand the topic of a conversation, but they often interpret a key word wrongly and mis-interpret the topic. This could be because the word has multiple meanings (a student of mine went through a whole lesson thinking we were talking about people from Poland when in fact we were discussing the coldest parts of the Earth) or because the word is close in sound to another (eg track/truck). Students can be asked to listen to snippets of natural speech and choose between different words (“did she say track, truck or trick?”), or different meanings of the same word (“is she talking about a party as in a celebration or a political party?”).
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Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Daily bread 01/20/2016
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5-Minute Film Festival: 8 Videos for ELL Classrooms | Edutopia
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Finding Your Way Around Moodle 3.0 – From The 2016 Learn Moodle MOOC | Moodle News
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Are You Ready To Teach With Moodle? Join The Next Learn Moodle MOOC This Sunday | Moodle News
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Want To Use The Question Bank For Your Moodle Quizzes? | Moodle News
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Academi Theme From Nephzat Technologies Updated For 3.0.1 | Moodle News
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Video: Moodle Google Hangout Integration by @paradisosol | Moodle News
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Gamify Your Quizes With The Quizventure Plugin | Moodle News
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Confirm Your Moodlers With This Email Based Registration Plugin | Moodle News