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[Augustus]

Hello,

Well as I reported awhile back I was offered a place on a CELTA course and am now in the process of tackling the post interview task and am come up against difficulties.

I have spent hours and hours on this task although I admit that I keep going off at a tangent to look at other stuff as trying to "up" my knowledge generally. Firstly, collocations - they just aren't explained anywhere that expansively .... I've been advised to purchase course books but all three seem to be Learning Teaching type book with no emphasis on grammar and Raymond Murphy wasn't helpful either. I've resorted to Google and its been more helpful and offered examples but no really explanation.

My question states that I must find the following examples:

verb-noun collocations, verb-preposition collocation, adjective-noun collocations, adverb-adjective collocations... and that sentences may contain more than one example.

Furthermore, I have just discovered phonology .... wow how on earth can anyone interpret these strange symbols to make words?

All the answers are available elsewhere anyway but I am battling to understand so any help would be much appreciated.

[artemisia]

Hi Augustus

Good to see you're going ahead with your plans. I think one of the issues for you, if memory serves me correctly, is gaining an understanding of parts of speech or word class: verb, noun, adverb etc. It will be difficult to identify types of collocations in a sentence without having a fairly good grasp of that.

Collocations: words that go together to form (part of) an expression: make a cake or do the housework (verb + noun). You wouldn't say them the other way round: make the housework / do a cake. It sounds wrong to a native speaker although it's grammatically logical in terms of the verb/noun combination and probably still understandable.

I don't know where you've looked (posting site examples might be a good idea next time) but you could try these sites aimed at language learners. The second one is a pdf taken from "Collocations in Use" (from a good vocabulary series of language in use books). I haven't extensively checked the first website so I don't know if all the examples are great, but it's a starting point and seems to give a fairly good, basic overview. I suggest you spend a bit of time reading through. Hopefully you can start getting your head around how collocations work a little bit more.

http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/collocations.htm
http://www.freewebs.com/english1-0/type%20of%20collocatios.pdf

Others might have other useful site examples as well.

[fluffyhamster]

To familiarize yourself with the phonetic symbols used in the English phonemic* (basically, learner/pronunciation-indicating) alphabet, first take a look at this:
http://www.oup.com/elt/global/products/englishfile/elementary/c_pronunciation/

I'd also suggest taking a look at the at the pronunciation guides supplied in learner dictionaries (scroll to about halfway down the following page: http://www.ldoceonline.com/howtouse.html ), and testing yourself by thinking of random words (for example, the words I just typed: 'and', 'testing', etc), writing them in the IPA symbols, and then looking up those words to see if you were correct or even close (the online Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries are better than the Longman, in that they actually supply the IPA, and for both standard British and American English: http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ , http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ ).

You might also like to play around with this http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~danhall/phonetics/sammy.html (Note that this only shows the positions for making consonants, i.e. the ways the vocal organs prepare for and shape~close-off what would otherwise be the continuous vowel sounds/airstream passing through. I won't give links to 'vowel tongue position diagrams' and the like though, because they are a bit abstract and might be hard to grasp, and aren't really CELTA level. The Glossary here http://www.cambridge.org/gb/elt/catalogue/subject/project/custom/item2491705/English-Phonetics-and-Phonology-Resources/?site_locale=en_GB&currentSubjectID=382387 will help though, if you choose to go deeper into articulatory phonetics).

Then, on one of your older threads, I mentioned a link to a YouTube clip of Adrian Underhill (author of Sound Foundations) giving a seminar using his phonemic chart. If you have time (up to an hour), give that a go, as I'm sure you will learn a lot and his approach looks pretty good in essence. Here's the link again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kAPHyHd7Lo

Regarding collocations, the following appears to be an online version of the Oxford Collocations Dictionary:
http://www.ozdic.com/

Collocations aren't mere chance pairings of words (e.g. buy or eat...a hotdog? Far too open a choice of noun (or indeed verb)), but you won't want to be picking stuff that isn't very frequent (e.g. 'abandon hope', as opposed to 'save time', for an example of v + n). You should be able to do this on your own, TBH, as you surely know your parts of speech by now. I'll be willing to look over whatever examples you pick, though! NB: the compilers of the OCD decided that nouns should be excluded from verb entries~starting points, as "people generally start from a noun when framing their ideas" (and think about that 'save time' collocation: starting from 'save' is far too "open", compared to from 'time'). See pg vi of the Introduction (a useful intro to collocations generally), namely the 'Looking up a collocation in the dictionary' part, of the Look Inside preview available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Collocations-Dictionary-Colin-McIntosh/dp/0194325385/ . Finally, note that a lot of collocations will be given and marked in ordinary learner dictionaries (like the Longman etc above), but you'll probably prefer to use the OCD for now, as you can be surer with its selections.


*Phonology and phonemes are basically about specific-language subsets drawing on the wider phonetic symbol-inventory, e.g. English for everyday learner purposes uses only some 40-odd symbols out of the many more (some 150-ish?) available in the IPA (international Phonetic Alphabet). The IPA needs those many more symbols because it has to be able to phonetically describe (and sometimes in quite a lot of detail) the whole range of the world's languages. Basically, phonetics=linguistics, while phonology, phonemics and phonemes=ELT, TEFL. Note also the terms broad (i.e. not too detailed) versus narrow (i.e. very detailed) transcription. ELT uses a broad transcription that tolerates a fair amount of allophony ("multiple possible spoken sounds (or phones) used to pronounce a single [and somewhat idealized~abstract - FH] phoneme" - from the Wikipedia entry for 'allophone').

[Denim-Maniac]

Hello Augustus

My first piece of advice ... DONT PANIC! These pre-course tasks are designed to introduce you to some of the tools and things encountered on the course. You arent supposed to know them inside out before starting the course, and all your fellow trainees will probably be in the same boat.

The course isnt going to teach you grammar and phonology, but it will show you a method of teaching in which both grammar and phonology are tools you may encounter and use.

Collocations in the simplest sense, are words that go together. Some of these word relationships are stronger than others. Common student mistakes might be saying things like 'make a photo', which may be OK in their own language, but the collocation in English uses the verb 'to take' with the noun 'photo'. The task you have is just asking you to find some similar relationships with words. Some of these relationships or collocations will be very very strong ... think of the word 'unrequited' for example ... its almost always going to be with 'love' right? So thats a strong collocation ... some other examples make things grammatically correct. We can be 'shocked by' or 'shocked at', but probably not 'shocked in'.

The IPA, those funny darn symbols, help students pronounce the words in English. If you think of words like heard / beard / word, you can see the spelling of the word doesnt always represent the sounds used. The IPA helps because it transcribes the actual sound of the word. You dont need to be 100% confident or capable of using this to pass your course. So again, dont panic.

When you are on the course and have to teach new words, the course trainees will probably like to see you use the IPA to show students the differences between troublesome words. Its just a very very small part of the EFL pie, and you may or may not need to use it all the time when you teach in the future. There are a few iPhone type apps that exist to show IPA if you want to get more familiar with them, but you really dont need to know them 100%. Dictionaries (including online ones) will help you if you need to find the correct transcription for your course.

One of the groups of students I teach are from Germany, and they dont tend to know the IPA so we dont use it in my classes with them.

Good luck with the course though!

[fluffyhamster]

Good post, D-M! Esp. your point about how IPA is a consistent guide (hence its use) compared to the less consistent actual ordinary spellings of words. (IPA is basically an ancillary script for learners, or linguists etc). I'd really advise Augustus to try to learn those 40-odd phoneme symbols now though (at least the consonant symbols - the vowels may take a bit to fully sink in), because most of the students I've met have been reasonably familiar with them, and there probably won't be a better time to try memorizing them (one tends to get rather busy once the actual teaching job starts!). It's not so much the symbols themselves but how they (i.e. the sounds that they represent) are articulated by the speech organs that is important, and one may need to give sure guidance in such matters whenever one is teaching beginners, for example.

Pronunciation should be a big albeit somewhat ugly sister in TEFL, but it is kept as such a Cinderella that the students often have a better grasp of it than the teachers (which isn't a defensible state of affairs, IMHO). Another thing to consider is that with the increasing number of young learners nowadays, it'll be much easier for a teacher to get to grips with phonics-based approaches if they already know the underlying phonemes.

Same with grammar really - I wouldn't call it a mere tool, but an actual basis. (It doesn't need to be explicitly taught in quite the same way that the teacher learns it, however - that's part of the genesis and "genius" of individual teaching, to find a perhaps different way, that is more amenable to oneself and one's learners).