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How Do You Measure Improvement When You Are Working on Your Accent?
Posted by Independent Excellence Tutoring on October 16, 2009
Many students arrive for tutoring with only a basic idea that they want to improve their speaking skills. One student recently told me that she felt she had no idea what was happening at first and only realized the steps she had achieved after the accent had lessened. The voice is a subject that many people never study. In American schools, public speaking is an elective, and even then the content is more important than the way a person speaks. So the question is: how do we measure improvements in speech?
Milestone 1: Finishing Grammar
Some people have no trouble with written grammar, but difficulty with speaking correctly. The common problem-points are: use of "a," "an" and "the" and use of prepositions (in, on, at, for, behind and so on). Studying rules for these small words and practicing using the rules with a teacher will move you to the place where you are ready to work on speech. You cannot master American rhythm if you are leaving out "a" or "the" in places where listeners expect to...
Learn About American History & Culture While Learning English
Posted by carolinalisa on April 01, 2009
Learning a language can be a difficult and daunting task. Endless verb conjugations, pronouns, adjectives, and articles can all be a confusing jumble of words strung together to make a confusing jumbled sentence! But, it does not have to be that way. Learning another language can be fun and rewarding. My approach to helping...
contrast
Posted by zeinab taher on March 17, 2009
Once I was asked who am I? At the begining I was surprised, I neverthought of that, I never tried to analyze my personality but I was in a situation that I have to answer or I will look like a dump!!!!
I started to think and I realized that the best way is to tell the truth or in an another meaning I have to speak frankly,If I tried to make myself look like an angel I will be a big liar and if I egnore being an angel I'll be a devil !!!whats a miss!!!
When I started to answer I found a very strange thing; I'm...
Metaphors and Constructing a Speaker
Posted by WAL on February 18, 2009
Construction is a process that involves the building or assembling of infrastructure. A solid building is impossible without a solid foundation. A strong foundation is a nice metaphor often used to talk about developing knowledge, but we have to use such a metaphor with care. When talking about second language learning, we can begin from the basic building blocks of speech. However, such an approach becomes problematic in teaching pronunciation and building language skills in a second language learner.Let’s consider: Following a construction model, we start with the basic building blocks of speech. A phone is a sound. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound which can distinguish two words. ‘Ran’ and ‘tan’ differ only in their initial sound. Except for a few linguistic dissenters, most state that there are 44 phonemes in English, 24 of which are consonants. Languages vary in the number of phonemes. A phone can be broken down further, as it has different forms called allophones. The sound /p/ is made differently in the word ‘pair’ from how it is in ‘spare.’ The former sound /p/ is called aspirated because a puff of air is made while pronouncing it; there is no puff of air made with ‘spare.’Any linguistic...
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- Posted by Dave Schappell on February 21, 2009
Thanks for the article -- I found this really interesting, because I always found second language learning really difficult -- always seemed like there was a better way to learn things, as I could understand when reading practice exercises, but always got lost in the real-time flow of the language. I'm glad that there are better ways emerging to learn languages.
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- Posted by Joseph Sunga on February 25, 2009
I love the metaphors and the comparisons in this article. It's one thing to talk about something, but it's another thing when you compare it. I'm more of a visual person, so throughout reading this -- I imagined a small Tagalog Building and a taller English building. My Tagalog needs a bit more building blocks.
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