Job Discussion Forums

[nawlinsgurl]

I'm teaching a college-level ESL speaking class. The book the college has provided is actually very crap, and most of the students agree that it is way above their level. The biggest problem they seem to have is listening and understanding what was said. And also pronuncation. The "play and pray" thing is really hard for them. Any ideas???? I can use all the help I can get! Thanks!!

[PAULH]

[abufletcher]

[wintersweet]

[PAULH]

[abufletcher]

Here are the course objectives for the first-year "Talk-in-Interaction" course I teach (which replaced an earlier "eikaiwa" class in the curriculum):

I. Interactional objectives
a. opening a conversation (on the phone and face-to-face)
1. doing greetings
2. identifying oneself
3. �how's it going� and interactionally suitable replies
4. stating the reason for the call (or proposing a first topic)
b. doing pre-closing moves
1. Phrases such as: �Well, I've got to be going now.�
�Well, it's been nice talking with you.�
2. Making plans for the future (�see ya tomorrow in class�)
c. closing a conversation using a standard �two-step� pattern
d. invitation/offer sequences
1. making simple invitations
2. accepting an invitation using a �preferred turn shape�
3. rejecting an invitation using a �dispreferred turn shape�
4. using pre-invitations to avoid rejections
5. �go-ahead� moves following pre-invitations
6. �blocking� moves following pre-invitations
7. responding to blocking moves
e. request sequences
1. making simple requests
2. granting a request using a �preferred turn shape�
3. refusing a request using a �dispreferred turn shape�
4. using pre-requests to avoid refusals
5. �go-ahead� moves following pre-requests
6. �preemptive offers� following pre-requests
7. �blocking� moves following pre-requests
f. assessment sequences (�assessment� = �opinion�)
1. making simple assessments, e.g. �This's great!�
2. agreeing with assessments (preferred turn shape)
a. �upgrade� assessments
b. �same evaluations�
3. disagreeing with assessments (dispreferred turn shape)
a. �weak agreements� + �weak disagreement�
e.g. �It was but��, �I think so too but��
4. using �tag questions� in assessments
g. telling news
1. using pre-announcements like �Guess what?�
2. responding to pre-announcements
3. telling news
4. responding to news
a. oh + assessment
b. really? (prompting further news-telling)
5. avoiding telling news:
A: How was your day?
B: OK (B has no news or does not wish to tell news)
vs.
A: How was your day?
B: Great! (B has news and wants to tell it)
h. telling stories in conversation
1. using story prefaces
2. responding to story prefaces

II. Linguistic objectives
a. increase the students' overall rate (speed) of talk by:
1. teaching them to �chunk� talk
2. working on intonational contours
3. focusing on the negative interaction impact of pauses
b. teach linguistic patterns associated with various sequences

III. Cultural objectives
a. differences in English and Japanese telephone openings.
b. English speaker stereotypes of �monotone� speakers
c. English �tatemae� such as �Maybe some other time.�
d. Japanese/English similarity in use of dispreferred turn shapes
1. English speak most definitely DO NOT say no directly!
2. Parallels in pause and hestitation tokens.

As you can see, there's plenty of other far more important stuff to be working on in speaking class.

[abufletcher]

BTW, Paul's joke is one of many involving minimal pairs. But I think there's something deeper here. Why are there in fact so many humorous minimal pair combinations in the world's languages? I think it is because there is some kind of inherent tendency for minimal pairs to be disambiguated in the "sematic space" to the greatest extent possible. To say this in another way, words with similar sounds tend to have wildly different meanings.

Upshot. Context almost always makes it clear which word the speaker intended to produce. They make for fun jokes but in real life only an idiot would mistake the meanings. Therefore, I'd rather spend my precious classroom time working to improve my students' abilities to infer meaning from context than practicing dreary and pointless minimal pair drills. BTW, I'd say that the use of minimal pairs harks back to the now largely discredited Contrastive Analysis approach to second language teaching.

Here's the sort of pronunciation issue I WOULD spend time on:

I c'n go on Friday.
I can't go on Friday. (<-- Hint, there is absolutely no /t/ sound in this.)

[Yawarakaijin]

The problems with L and R are for me like some others mostly a non-issue for me when teaching. Teaching the minimal pairs is often enough as no student would ever want to confuse some of them once the differences in meaning are brought to their attention:D. As stated earlier "only an idiot would confuse some of the meanings".
I remember watching a documentary years ago. It stated that past the age of 3 or something like that, the human child's brain can no longer distinguish between some differences in pronunciation. Perfect example the L and R of English. The reason being that Japanese children's brain's had never had to learn to distinguish between the two because the sounds do not exist in Japanese. It goes on to explain that if during childhood the child's brain is exposed to these sounds then he is able to hear the differences between them once a connection is made in the brain.
It was accompanied by a very interesting experiment in which caucasian youngsters who had been exposed to Mandarin when young were able to distinguish between similar sounds in Mandarin. Older children who had never been exposed to Mandarin found it much more difficult. I do not claim to be an expert in linguistics and it was quite a while ago since I had seen the documentary so I apologize if I have left out/mistaken anything important.
When it comes too actually pronouncing the L and R I also agree that its a lost cause. I mean structurally they are formed very differently ( in the mouth ). If you teach it once to them.. I mean honestly, if they can't grasp the difference what can you do?
When I teach pronunciation I really try to focus on things they might actually be confused by. The example of the can v.s can't when spoken very quickly and reduced by a native speaker can cause serious comprehension problems.
Another thing I often go over with students are consonant clusters. Everytime I teach consonant clusters it appears that it's the first time Japanese had ever heard of the concept. For those who are unfamiliar, this is when 3 consonant sounds and I say sounds not always necessarily letters happen in groups of threes. Example CHRISTMAS. The H sound disappears as its between two other consonants and the T sound as well. There are exceptions to the rules however.
Another thing I often go over with them is Linking/Blending. Various rules apply, you can probably find them on the net.

Example: Can I have a bag of it-----> Ca ni ha va ba go vit.
This of course only happens in rapid speech.

I find things like this, when taught along with the rules that govern and backed up with tons of practice, really get the student's attention. Check out the net on Linking/Blending and consonant clusters and I'm sure you could keep your students busy for hours.

[abufletcher]

[Birdog3344]

Nawlinsgurl, perhaps you could rephrase and be more specific with your question and what kind of advice you're looking for. Are their listening difficulties with a pre-recorded tape or cd? If so, it might help to pre-teach some of the more difficult words or phrases. Choose the vocabulary that you think may cause them trouble and give them a chance to come up with a definition in pairs before giving it to them in a sentence or a definition if neccesary. Once they understand all or most of the words they'll have a much easier time with the listening comprehension.

Good luck!

[Yawarakaijin]

Abufletcher as stated in the post im no expert in Linguistics and maybe I was not as technical as I should have been. Granted I may be ignorant as to what a college "speaking" class is comprised of, I have never taught a Japanese college course.

What is the difference between saying things out loud and speaking? This is an honest question not a contradiction of your statement. I personally never pronounce the H or the T consonant when I say these words.

All I was saying was each letter has a corresponding sound be it a vowel or consonant sound and in some situations consonants sounds are omitted when speaking. One common situation being when 3 consonant sounds follow one after another the middle consonant sound is often not pronounced.

When you say or read CHRISTMAS do you pronounce it...

K HUH RIST MAS or KRISMAS ?

[lalalateda]

Hey, check out these links from the teacher forum if you want hints on how to teach 'l' and 'r' pronunciation.

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=1257&highlight=pronunciation

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=791&highlight=pronunciation

[abufletcher]

[nawlinsgurl]

Hi everyone! Thanks for so many replies. I was busy all day and didn't have time to reply, so I just printed the info out and read it while on the way to work.
Basically, I told the students that they should practice at home with a mirror and see how their tongue and mouths moved when they say the words. We tried this in class and it looked kinda funny, but it worked.

My first post was prolly confusing, but I also was asking for advice on just teaching college ESL in general. Previously, I taught a writing class--which was way easy for me since that was my major in Uni. But after being at the one of the BIG 4 for a year, I'm not really sure how to go about approaching the college ESL class. I found out that reading news articles and asking questions for them to expand on by way of opinions and etc was a pretty good second lesson. This class is mid-to-high level, and basic introductions are a piece of cake for them.
They seem to lack in the listening dept. and also have trouble with tenses when speaking. I dunno, maybe I have adapted to the broken Japanese english so much from working at the Big 4 that it actually sounds ok to me?
Also what do you do when one person has a REALLY bad accent? She's not Japanese and she can speak English but everyone has trouble hearing what she's saying through her accent.

Sorry if this post sounds all over the place! Anyways, thanks for all the help so far---any and I do mean ANY ideas, help, etc for teaching this college speaking class would be greatly appreciated.

And Paulh, that joke was funny!

[abufletcher]

For the most part, in mainstream EFL teaching, "teaching speaking" is treated as simply an opportunity to practice the linguistic system. It's just a sort of workout rather than really learning to "do speaking." Like doing laps around the track. The focus is still on grammar (and to a lesser extent vocabulary). Litlte attention is paid to actually teaching students the practical skills of interacting with one another in English.

There are several models for speaking classes and among the most well-established is the "topic-based discussion" format. Your example of discussing news articles fits in there. There are tons of EFL books on the market that are centered around topic-based discussion.

I prefer to begin with "mundane" conversation as the base form and only later at more advanced levels move to specialized formats like "discussion" or "negotiation."

In the area of teaching writing, most teachers have moved away from a focus on the "product" of writing (i.e. the compositon to be savagely marked up by the teacher) and towards a "process' approach to writing where the focus is on the steps and procedures through with writing gets accomplished.

Sadly, we haven't yet made that same transition in the teaching of speaking. It's still just a matter of somehow eliciting a sample of student talk so that the teacher can correct the errors. I say it's time we finally took a "precess" approach to the teaching of speaking as well!

I know this might not sound like very practical advice at the moment, but I'm hoping that just maybe I could get you to consider that teaching speaking isn't necessarily the sort of thing everyone assumes it to be.