Daily bread 01/21/2016

• Getting to Si, Ja, Oui, Hai, and Da

  tags: business cultural awareness

• What's the pronunciation? | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC

  tags: Games

• Gap fill poems | TeachingEnglish | British Council | BBC

  tags: low level

• Isagen: Energy independence lost? | The City Paper Bogotá

  tags: business

• Bottom-up decoding: listening | Oxford University Press

  • 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?”)

  • 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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