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- Saying 'no' Nicely
By Kenneth Beare, About.com Guide Sometimes you need to say no when someone makes a suggestion, offers something or asks you to do something for them. Of course, saying just 'no' can be rather rude. Here are some of the most common ways...
- Connected Speech & Linking | American English Pronunciation
Many of my students say they want to sound just like a native English speaker. I understand the desire, but my answer to them is always the same. The goal is not to be perfect, but to progress; to beunderstood when speaking...
- Three Biggest Challenges Facing An English Learner
by Tomasz P. Szynalski 1. Developing a passion for learning EnglishAll English learners would like to speak English well. They are excited at the idea of being able to communicate in English fluently. However, they usually don?t care about the learning...
- Analyze Your Speaking Style
By Lisa Mojsin Here?s something that will help some of you quickly improve your accents. Do a little self-diagnosis of your individual speaking style. Here are three questions to ask yourself: 1. Do you tend to speak quickly in you native language?...
- Savoring And Improving
Although the difficulties, the journey to speak English is a blessing for the mind. It is known by the cientists and neurolinguistics that the brain gets stronger when one is learning a new language or how to play a musical instrument....
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Is Reading Allowed, Aloud?
By Jeremy Harmer
Many years ago I had something of a disagreement with a colleague who, in a class I had watched, had the learners read aloud from a chapter of Roald Dahl?s autobiography ?Going Solo?. Paragraph by paragraph, they went round the room struggling with unknown vocabulary in that stumbling robotic intonation that is particular only to people reading a text that is completely unfamiliar to them.
As I say, we had a slight disagreement over the pedagogical value of such an exercise. It is not something I would ever do with classes and frankly, it?s something I associate with the prescriptive, repetitive, grammar translation hell of my Latin classes at school. And in that context I can understand it more, as the only other speakers of Latin I was ever likely to encounter were in that same room and communicative opportunities were somewhat infrequent (not that this was the point) ? so if our teacher wanted to know whether we could pronounce our Latin correctly, this was the only avenue open to him. Which does raise an interesting question ? how does anyone know what the correct pronunciation of Latin is? Has it been handed down, speaker to speaker, throughout the millennia?
In any event, the question cropped up again recently and on this occasion I wondered whether I was alone in my distaste for Reading Aloud (or RA), or whether there were lots of good reasons to do RA that I just wasn?t aware of. In short I asked Twitter what it thought.
The general consensus that there might be reasons to do RA, but that nobody had done RA with their classes ? nor was likely to.
Reasons people came up with were:
o If the teacher reads aloud, the learners can develop sound-spelling relationship awareness
o To kill time / run out the clock in class
o Classroom management ? a settling and focusing activity for young learners or more active classes
o As a focus on sentence stress or intonation work
o Practicing giving speeches or other ?real world? reading aloud tasks (e.g. drama / poetry)
But:
o Teachers often use ?it?s good for their pronunciation? as an excuse to justify the activity
o Roleplay or drama isn?t quite the same thing as reading aloud anyway
o There is a difference between written and spoken English anyway, so the value is questionable
o It can be quite stressful for students to be put on the spot like that
More: http://teflgeek.net/2012/11/09/is-reading-allowed-aloud/
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- Saying 'no' Nicely
By Kenneth Beare, About.com Guide Sometimes you need to say no when someone makes a suggestion, offers something or asks you to do something for them. Of course, saying just 'no' can be rather rude. Here are some of the most common ways...
- Connected Speech & Linking | American English Pronunciation
Many of my students say they want to sound just like a native English speaker. I understand the desire, but my answer to them is always the same. The goal is not to be perfect, but to progress; to beunderstood when speaking...
- Three Biggest Challenges Facing An English Learner
by Tomasz P. Szynalski 1. Developing a passion for learning EnglishAll English learners would like to speak English well. They are excited at the idea of being able to communicate in English fluently. However, they usually don?t care about the learning...
- Analyze Your Speaking Style
By Lisa Mojsin Here?s something that will help some of you quickly improve your accents. Do a little self-diagnosis of your individual speaking style. Here are three questions to ask yourself: 1. Do you tend to speak quickly in you native language?...
- Savoring And Improving
Although the difficulties, the journey to speak English is a blessing for the mind. It is known by the cientists and neurolinguistics that the brain gets stronger when one is learning a new language or how to play a musical instrument....