Job Discussion Forums

[u24tc]

I was asked by a friend to help out her friend in some oral English lessons.
Not wanting to disappoint, I said yes.

The individual in question is looking for some general oral english lessons together with some listening comprehension, pronunciation.

I was wondering if others had any useful advice, links, information that could help me create some sort of structured lessons.

Thanks in advance!

[Lorean]

[AussieGuyInChina]

[bearcanada]

OP, you've been given some good advice above, and also a whole boatload of total nonsense. DON'T BOTHER trying to correct pronunciation mistakes? DON'T TRY to speak clearly? Speak at NATIVE SPEED? If you follow advice like this, you should be working in a fish market.

For most Chinese, learning proper English sounds is not difficult because almost all the English sounds exist in Chinese as well. The real problem they have is putting together various combinations of sounds that are often found together in English but seldom in Chinese. Southern Chinese (HK, Guangzhou) will have more trouble, but above that EW line, almost all can learn to speak English with little or no noticeable accent. And you absolutely should work on that.

The problems are not with consonants but with the vowel sounds, especially the combined ones. Put together a table of the common English vowel sounds - ai, ei, ee, ou, ow, ah, ahh, and so on, and find ten or twenty short words that contain these sounds, and have your student practice them in your presence. It's not very difficult and it's fun.

Depending on the student's level, if you don't speak slowly and clearly you won't be understood. If that suits some teachers, well and good, but you're wasting your time and that of your student. And you're being a lousy teacher. At the start, you MUST speak more slowly and clearly to be sure the student can absorb the sounds correctly, and so they can UNDERSTAND YOU! They can't practice good listening if they can't HEAR the sounds properly. You can speed up to normal rates when their comprehension indicates appropriate understanding.

It is of no consequence to you if 'most FTs' don't understand pronunciation. The only relevant question is whether you do, and from your post it seems that you would. So do it. And yes, a great deal of our English speech is bad and unprofessional, to say nothing of careless and sloppy. And your students, rather than being insulted by your 'speaking down' to them, will appreciate your consideration. How would you like to try to learn Chinese if your teacher spoke at normal rates? You'd be lost.

It infuriates me that so many posters on this board see themselves as qualified 'teachers' when they can't string two sentences together without abominable mistakes, and then so freely dispense totally idiotic advice about how to abuse students.

For conversation, get your student talking to you. Write a short essay about you - your Chinese and English names, where you are from, the university you attended, a few things about your home city, how long you have been in China, where you live now, how you get to work and how long it takes you. What you like or don't like about the city you live in, where you normally eat and what you eat. And so on. Then have your student follow that pattern and fill in the blanks to reflect his or her situation.

You can progress to where things are. The book is on the table. What is across, next to, behind, down the street from, on the next block from your home. Where is the nearest bank, supermarket........

You can do short ones on shopping, on buying clothes, on going for a walk, on hundreds of things. These are where the most useful words are that your student will need to carry introductory sensible conversations. If you start here, you will figure out the rest for yourself. And if you need genuinely useful advice, this is not the best place to get it.

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[Lorean]

[Lorean]

[bearcanada]

There are many people who cannot see the forest for the trees. Memorising terms from a book does not qualify anyone for a real job in the real world.

People cannot learn to imitate sounds they cannot hear clearly and properly digest mentally. Advising a language teacher to avoid efforts to speak clearly and/or slowly to inexperienced students is merely stupid. To avoid efforts to speak clearly to anyone, anytime, is merely stupid.

FYI, the expression is 'fed up WITH', not 'fed up OF'.

.

[Lorean]

[sheeba]

Lorean. We had this same argument with Bear Canada a while back. Forget it! I'm sure you have more useful things to do with your time.

I've just started a few one to one lessons. They can get boring easily if you don't prepare. I do 2 hour lessons but they seem to fly by(at the moment). The great advantage for the student is that they have a native speaker to model. My Uni students don't have such opportunity as they work mainly in groups in my classes.I purposely work on weak forms, elisions and so on with my one to one student as of course natural English speakers(apart from Bear) all use these and this is where they have the biggest problems. It's my belief that one needs to be able to speak quickly (with elisions,assimilations weak forms) to begin to notice these subtleties of the language.

Sounds are created in 'harmonic ranges'. The ratio between the frequencies in these ranges affects our differentation of the sound from other similar sounds.There is an acceptable range of ratios between frequencies, that is sound variations, within a given phoneme that allows us to recognise it. So we recognise sound variations according to a prototype. A sound may be recognised if it is within 100 hz of the target prototype. This is how we comprehend individual and dialect variation.

So we all have variation in our speech but most of us don't drift too far away from this therefore we can understand one another. For anyone to suggest that there is a 'way' of speaking clearly perhaps can understand that this is simply not a possibility.

This is why my friend from the South who has problems with Mandarin phonemes can be understood by other Chinese(to my surprise) even though he mixes all his l's and n's up along with other mistakes. It's my belief that frequency is very important in language comprehension and many would agree that pitch is one of the most important.

So do the individual phonems really deserve such intense study? I would say not and that students really do need to feel the language as we use it naturally with its rhythm and frequency. Phonology has a lot more importance than phonetics IMHO and the stress timed language feature that causes these weak forms HAS to be studied if students have any chance of understanding natives.

[MGreen]

This is the difference between someone who can speak the language and someone who can teach the language. Like Sheeba said, Lorean don�t waste your time on Bear.

[bearcanada]

Sheeba, I don't disagree with anything you said, so spare me the insults. I wasn't addressing my comments to you.

Lorean, you're a dingbat. You make blanket statements that are just plain idiotic and wrong, and when challenged you retreat behind that superior pedantic sophistry and ignore the original points.

Nobody said anything about native speakers not slurring sounds. We were talking about your advice to avoid speaking clearly and slowly to beginner students.

You and Sheeba both appear to have phonetic knowledge that spans the Universe. I am truly awestricken by the level of trivia you can bring into a conversation to obscure a point and avoid admitting you gave foolish advice. Too bad the Enterprise isn't looking for more crew members; otherwise you could contribute your wealth to the population of Epsilon Eridani 9.

"Searching for 'fed up of' returns over 900 thousand results with Google." Really? And searching for 'fed up with' returned 79,000,000.

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[sheeba]

Bear. No insults are being thrown to anyone. Perhaps you could be a bit more diplomatic in your posts. We're all just trying to help each other aren't we?All Lorean is saying is that we have a stressed timed language which is a valuable point. Lorean has some useful inputs.Something you are saying that does not exist on this forum. Just because she reads and uses her knowledge to back up her teaching really does not go against her in any way does it? I only wish more teachers were better read in areas such as phonology. It's not the sort of area that teachers' can provide valuable advice to students unless they have studied it and it is a big problem area in the Chinese class(especially at the higher levels).