Job Discussion Forums

[Sonnet]

bearcanada, have you ever taught English to anyone better than elementary level?

[11:59]

I think it is nothing short of frightening that there are people like Bear Canada out there in classrooms. Whether weak forms are used or not by native speakers depends on a whole host of factors (of which they are of course totally unaware, at least consciously), such as whether or not there is an instance of ellipsis or whether it is an auxiliary verb versus a verb with its own lexical semantics. In other words, weak and strong forms often signify and reflect � and thereby alert others (read, students) to � grammatical roles. I would very much like to see (or rather, hear) you try and be 'lazy' with 'do' in the reply to the following: 'Do you smoke?', 'Yes, I do.' And, with normal intonation, I would very much like to hear you attempt to try to produce the two 'dos' in an identical fashion in 'What do you do?'. Or compare the vowels in the two instances of 'can' in 'You may not think I can swim but I can'. I could go on but what is the point?

[bearcanada]

There may be more of a point to this than you assume. I don't know where you are from, but you might consider that not everyone in the world speaks English as you do. One of the supposed benefits of living in other countries and cultures is that we learn that 'our way' is not the only way nor the best way nor the way that God intended, but just one way.

I hail from Western Canada. We are the only people in the English-speaking world who speak the language without any accent whatever. OK. You don't have to accept that; it's true nevertheless. One advantage is that when we speak, everyone from everywhere can understand us without a problem. That is not true for many people from many other states or countries.

You might want to consider what that means. Even those from the Pacific Northwest and North-Central parts of the US have accents that are quite noticeable to us. People from the Southern US, the Eastern Seaboard, all Aussies and many Englishmen have very strong and sometimes abominable accents (and speech habits).

You might want to consider whether the concept of what is commonly called 'weak forms' is merely a descriptive attempt to catalogue what is, rather than a measure of how things should be. And yes, I know, there is a long argument about how there are no 'shoulds'.

I can pronounce your 'examples' just fine, without resorting to what you call 'weak forms'. That's inherent in speaking English without an accent. It's true that I often truncate the sounds in my casual speech, but I don't do that with my students.

For your information, I teach only university graduates, mostly high-level professionals who have lived overseas and who are interested in refining their speaking and professional writing abilities. And I lecture at the post-graduate level at Fudan University in Shanghai.

And I spend my time fixing what you teach these people at the lower levels. And yes, I teach them to speak like me - clear, clean English with no accent. And no, it does not sound forced or strange or unusual. It is simply easy to understand. And English-speaking strangers often comment to my students on how perfect their English seems to be, and enquire as to how and where they learned to speak so well.

You can spend your time telling me how right you are, or you can consider that there may be things you haven't considered.

.

[sheeba]

Bear Canada .

Do you use a coursebook in class ?

Or have you made up your own listening material with your mechanical speech ? Do you have special books where your from for your language ?

Do you have special films in your clean,clean part of Canada where everyone talks like a robot .

I've never heard of such a place in the West of Canada where people speak like this .

Or perhaps E.T. has landed in your town ?

[Sonnet]

You have no idea of linguistics, do you?

It's impossible to speak a language with no accent. You speak with a Western Canadian accent, I assume; this might be more neutral than many other accents, but it's still an accent.

And it's quite clear from your replies that you don't seem to have grasped what a weak form is, let alone how & why they're used, and the pedagogical benefits of exposing learners to them.

[bearcanada]

English is indeed a tonal language with inflections and stress that are constantly changing, often for emphasis or clarity. This includes the language spoken in Western Canada, and with the inflections there is nothing remotely robotic about it. We just don't mispronounce words. Why that should upset you, I can't imagine.

But we weren't talking about tones, we were talking about the proper pronunciation of letter and word sounds. You appear to have misconstrued this as "good pronunciation=monotone robotic English". Hardly what I said.

Students have no trouble understanding the written form of spoken sentences. The reason they have trouble with speech is that too many of us adapt our pronunciation and articulation for ease of speech (laziness, ease, convenience) rather than striving for clarity. Many words are lost because of this, and many phonemes are linked together as single sounds.

Because English uses timed inflections (and tonal variations) which create a kind of rhythm in our speech, we string words together and adjust the intervals between them to maintain that rhythm. The result is that we swallow many words, especially the little prepositions, articles, some verbs, conjuctions, etc.

Speak aloud and listen to yourself. Probably a third of all your words are mispronounced. Say "Bob". Now say it again. And now listen to yourself. You didn't say 'Bob'; you said 'Bawb' or 'Bub'. And yes, it will sound very strange to you if you pronounce this name correctly, but that's just an indication of where you are rather than a justification for careless pronunciation.

The expression is 'Fish AND chips', not 'fish und chips'. You can say it if you want, but don't pretend it's proper pronunciation even if everbody does it. It's the same with "I cun swim". That's not a 'weak form'; it's a lazy tongue and a sloppy attitude. The inability of your students to understand foreigners does not stem from what you call 'weak forms'; but rather from (sloppily) mispronounced words spoken too quickly.

It is of course possible to speak a language without an accent; to say otherwise is silly. Then you say an accent can be 'neutral'; and what is that if not the absence of....?

This is what you do:
First rid yourself of any trace of an accent. Second, get rid of the lazy tongues and sloppy speech habits. Third, pronounce the words properly: "I can swim" is not "I cun swim"; "idea" is not "idear"; "Alexander" is not "Aylaykesaynder"; "mate" is not "might". Fourth, separate the topic of tonal inflection from that of poor pronunciation.

What you have left is a small amount of what you might call 'weak forms', but that remainder is minuscule and won't produce an interesting discussion, much less a heated one.

And lastly, let me repeat my earlier comment: Having lost sight of our objective, we redoubled our effort. Your students still can't write more than two sentences without screwing up all the articles and they still say things like "Tomorrow we will happy" and "Be careful you don't upside down". But they will now know how to mispronounce anything with a vowel.

[sheeba]

Bear .

The bottom line is that speakers who are not familiar with weak forms are likely to have difficulty understanding speakers who use weak forms and practically all native speakers (except you apparently) use them . Therefrore it is important our learners understand them .

To say that using the weak form of can is not'proper' speech is simply ridiculous . You're saying that nearly every native speaker of English in the World (except your elite tribe in West Canada) are using English in an incorrect manner .

Fish n Chips is not pronounced with strong AND by the way .In fact we use the syllabic n after alveolar fricatives .Have you been to London ? This is natural English Bear . Perhaps you should step outside and learn it .

You sound a bit snobby mate and you don't sound very clued up .

[Sonnet]

English is a stress-timed language. By definition, this requires stressed & unstressed (weak) components in an utterance.

Changing which words are stressed, and consequently which words are not stressed (weak), changes the meaning of the utterance.

So, looking at your example of "I can swim", there is a *difference in meaning* between the pronunciations with strong or weak "can".

That's quite important, isn't it? Many of your "lazy" aspects of spoken English actually *add* meaning and clarity.

If you stress every syllable, you're turning English into a syllable-timed language. Like, say, Chinese. Which your students already speak. Drilling students *away* from trying to syllable-time English is a fairly important aspect in the training of oral English here.


Oh, and it's really not that hard to get students out of the habit of "tomorrow we will happy". Maybe you just need to brush up on your feedback & error-correction techniques?

[bearcanada]

We aren't disagreeing. Where did I say I stress every syllable equally? All I said was that I pronounce them properly and don't slur or ellide sounds because it's easier on the tongue. Of course some words are stressed more than others, and nobody says "fish AND chips". But they can still say 'and' instead of 'und', can't they?

Sheeba, you sound like one of those people with a less-than-neutral accent. You seem to boast about having been in the UK.

Have you ever been North of London? I've met people from up there whom I can understand only if they speak very slowly and move their lips a lot. Have you ever heard Ann Landers speak, with her screeching US mid-Western nasal twang? It's enough to send ghosts into hiding. Have you ever been to Noo Yawk and listened to da boids in da spring? I can still recall my Aussie tennis coach telling me, "Croist, might, you don't have to nile the sheet out of eet."

Why do you feel you must mock someone who speaks clear English with no accent?

Maybe instead of arguing that this is good, you might just admit that many people, maybe including you, have an accent that may not be desirable. Whatever you may accuse me of doing, you are teaching people to speak exactly as you speak. Are you sure that's good?

I agree that students need to learn to recognise the patterns, idioms and speech impediments of many people from many places. I just don't think they should imitate them in their own speech.

The patronising comments are unnecessary, and the "I know everything because I learned it from a book" is not the most useful attitude. I know we all had it when we left university, but maybe it's time to mellow out and recognise the separation between theory and practice and between the academic world and the real one.

What is the objective? I don't want my students to know grammar, at least not as an end in iitself, and certainly not esoteric grammar. I want them to speak elegantly, with a polished manner, so they sound educated and so their intelligence isn't masked by sloppy pronunciation or a careless attitude.

I don't teach my students 'weak forms'. Instead, I teach them that many people are careless, lazy and sloppy, with a poor attitude and have had little proper training in their language. Scream if you want, but all you have to do is look at the posts on this website. 80% of the posters border on being functionally illiterate, and I'm not referring to typos. In fact, I use posts from this board as exercises for my students to correct. I'm not mean enough to point out that all the mistakes are made by English teachers in China.

.

[bearcanada]

P.s.

As an addendum, yes I am saying that "nearly every native speaker of English in the World (except your elite tribe in WestERN Canada) are using English in an incorrect manner."

Plese note the theory of subject-verb agreement: "Every native speaker .... IS using ....." But never mind.

I'd like to share something. When I was in grade school we were drilled on all aspects of our native language to the point where we could argue them with university professors and hold our ground.

Byt the time my children were in school the situation had changed so much that at the time of their graduation from university they were, by my standards, illiterate. The teachers ignored spelling mistakes, overlooked abominable sentence construction and hapless writing; it just wasn't important any more.

That was true in all of North America and in other countries as well. You are a product of that generation. What is true for you, is not true for me. My guess is that there are few university students in North America today who could pass the English tests I had to face in Grade 8. Really.

Your 'fricative whatevers' were dutifully noted and I must say I am deeply impressed. I am willing to concede that your knowledge of the English language must span the Universe.

Too bad that your students still can't write more than two sentences without screwing up all the articles and that they still say "Tomorrow we will happy" and "Be careful you don't upside down."

But in your favor, and to your great credit, they now know how to mispronounce anything with a vowel in it. And, with luck, they earnestly believe that your accented mispronunciations are the correct way, and will never be misled by miscreants like me. Well done.
.

[Lobster]

Speakers from western Canada do indeed have their own distinct dialect (Heartland) and accent, and to claim that we have "unaccented English", while speakers from other countries speak some debased form of the language, is preposterous and linguistically chauvinistic. As a friend used to say when I playfully mocked his British accent, "Why do you think it's called English, mate?" The most that can be said is that we have pronunciation that's closer to dictionary standard, eh? Just as you don't notice the smell of your own house, neither can you hear your own regional accent until you are in a room full of speakers of other dialects.

Intonation and stress in English are ways of expressing different meanings and attitudes within the basic structure and often form the basis for sarcasm and humour. Thus we find that the following sentences have slightly different meanings:

What do you do at the Ministry of Education? (What is your occupation?)
What DO you do every day? (What activity do you actually engage in? Are you idle?)
What do you DO when forms are not submitted on time? (What course of action should be generally chosen in a specific situation?)
What DO you DO when someone refuses to listen? (implies that a course of action is difficult to identify)

Also the variation in tag questions slightly changes the meaning:

You don't like horror movies, do you? (I don't know.)
You don't like horror movies, DO you? (I don't think so.)

and the adjective/verb contrasts

WASHING machines can be dangerous.
Washing MACHINES can be dangerous.

I find that students who regularly engage in listening activities such as watching English-language movies tend to have better intonation, grasp of idioms, and pronunciation.

The fact is, these points are usually far beyond the grasp of all but our most advanced students. I find that, even in upper-level classes at college, I spend more time on basic compound-word stress patterns (*I like to eat waterMELON) and correct responses to negative questions (Can't you see the blackboard?) than on this type of issue.

RED

[sheeba]

[sheeba]

I'll try that again !!! Sorry dunno how to delete !

[Plan B]

I believe that bearcanada is merely being provocative for the sake of being provacative. I imagine he is actually a reasonable teacher getting p issed off at liguistical specifics handed down by those he perceives to be his occupational inferiors. Or maybe cos he's bored and has nothing better to do.

To state the obvious, weak forms are an integral part of any English course, despite the level. For this reason, the thread is not only valid, but deserves not to be derailed.

Let's move on, and continue the debate, as it was before it was so rudely interrupted...........

[sheeba]

Thanks Plan B.

Now what about contractions ? Are these weak forms . I don't think technically they are but I've seen mixed feelings .

Today I was teaching weak forms with was,were , has and had . The auxiliaries I feel are important to teach and contractions were covered in my exercises .

I found that students found it very difficult to distinguish between wasn't and was when pronounced in quick speech on the tape .

The boy wasn't happy is comprehended as the boy was happy . About half of all my classes make this mistake and it just totally changes the meaning of the sentences so I think this is important .

Advice I give to students I doubt they listen to so I 'd like to practice in class more . I wonder if anyone has any contraction exercises? Ones that are not boring too .

My exercise today went well . There was a picture (which I gave to all the students) of a messed up room with a load of teenagers having a party in . The story (which I told before ) was that one of the teenagers mum and dad had gone on hioliday but returned early due to bad weather . They returned to see the tv was broken , the cat wasn't very happy and so on .

We did some True /False exercises from the tape and then the students wrote some true sentences about the picture and some false . They then looked at the picture for a few minutes before turning it over so nobody could see . then they went around the class saying statements about the picture and students had to say if it was true or false .

Was Good practice of weak forms and contactions and I think they enkoyed it . was simple too so everybody could do it .

Gotta rush to lesson - seeya