Job Discussion Forums

[mcloo7]

[Harbin]

[Harbin]

[Bud Powell]

[Baishou]

The OP is going to be teaching Oral English at a university here. All this IPA talk is irrelevant for his purposes. His biggest challenge is going to be simply to get the students to talk.

Again, I will repeat: In an Oral English class, modeling pronunciation is good enough since we are live, walking talking English dictionaries. I also agree that focusing on stress and intonation is far more important than mastering obscure IPA symbology. To my mind, that adds an extra layer between the Chinese student's brain and tongue, when what they really need help with, at least from us, is speaking English on a more intuitive, and hence natural, level. Modeling is thus sufficient for this purpose, and as I noted above, they actually love to do this. I've seen the same thing in Korea as well, even at bars: Non-natives can sit there for hours at a time and have a ball repeating and practicing English phonetics. You can even sing or make games out of it. Just get them to open their damn mouths and forget all the rest!

[Non Sequitur]

[Bud Powell]

Ditto.

[Non Sequitur]

Spend as little time as possible talking---- including taking roll. Prepare an attendance roster in which they are required to write their names in pinyin next to their student ID number AND to write their names in Hanyu. You may find that the administration can't figure who someone is by just their student name and their pinyin name. Worse, they'll recognize the name, but won't be able to translate it to Hanyu. Save everyone a huge headache by having the student number, name in pinyin, name in Hanyu, and English name (if the students choiose to take one). Goe one final piece of information, include a space in which the student may write his place of birth or city of residence. I found that this form may take 1/2 an hour to produce in the beginning, but it will spare you an enormous headache at the end of the term when you turn in the grades.

Note also, that the English name a student is now using in your class, may be different to that recorded on the Admin computer where you go to load your marks.
I mentioned a suitable form in my 'what to expect thread', but was flamed for it.
I've never been asked for A, B, C marking, despite it being more suitable than percentages for Oral English.
If final assessments extend over two weeks, how do you make sure that an 82% awarded in the first week is the same as one awarded in the second week?
The small range afforded by A, B helps a bit.
Can't get Teaching Affairs to see it though - sigh.
If your records are good you can usually defend a query from a student who feels that a classmate isn't as good as he/she is.

[Javelin of Radiance]

[choudoufu]

[Harbin]

[roadwalker]

I've used IPA on occasion and on other occasions I've been asked specific questions by students about a sound where the student wrote the IPA for the sound or word in question. And like the poster above, I'm rusty with a few symbols by now, especially some of the vowel sounds. So it's good to have a chart on hand to refer to. But mostly I model sounds and mouth positions to the class, especially for sounds that are not clear from too many students' speech. Those problems vary by geography and by each class sometimes. I have caught myself ready to jump on the class for mispronouncing 'usually' or 'gradually', only to find that they do a good job with it. The next class may be horrible in that respect.

To me, learning the IPA has proven to be a good tool to have when teaching. Most of the time, I would agree that modeling speech is more useful to my class.

[Bud Powell]

[Harbin]

[Harbin]