Job Discussion Forums

[arioch36]

[AussieGuyInChina]

Very, very interesting!

My current job is teaching IELTS; something of a misnomer. Basically, I need to help my students increase their English ability to IELTS level 5.5 so that they can enter an Australian 'pathway program' (study in China for 2 years to achieve an Australian business diploma and be entitled to study in Australia for a further 2 years to get a bachelor's degree).

So, I teach reading, writing, listening and speaking.

The students' reading comprehension skills are adequate to good. They can read a page or two of text and then successfully answer most questions about the subject.

However, they can't read aloud (read out loud). They stammer, they stutter, they freeze. And the thing that amazes me the most is that when reading, they fall over words which I recall they have previously spoken to me when talking ad lib!

I do particular reading exercises which I call Look and Listen. I explain to the students that as I read the text out loud, they should look at the words and listen to the sound of the words so as to develop an ability to associate the sound of words with written words. I explain to the students that they shouldn't read, as such, and not worry about the meaning of the words while I am speaking. We have a Q & A at the end of the exercise where students can ask about definitions.

Anyway, improvement induced by the Look and Listen activities is either very slow to manifest, or non-existent.

I would be most receptive to other's ideas.

[Anda]

Answer:

My advice would be to use DVDs in class. Use an interesting section of a story where students listen and follow the English subtitles and then have the class read allowed using the subtitles without sound. This way they are seeing the language in use not just in print. Have the students try to mimic the voices of the actors to add interest. This will prepare them for listening to different English dialects as well which they will encounter once they are studying overseas.

I also use conversational scripts where students read after me and then pair work on. Once again I encourage them not to speak in a monotone voice.

[lf_aristotle69]

Sounds like some interesting and worthwhile suggestions Anda. But, I wonder if AGIC would have time to do the DVD method often in his program? It sounds like it's quite intensive. Might be something to do once or twice near the beginning of their course to show the students how, and then they can do more such activities in their own time. The script idea can be good, especially if your classes are small and you can listen and correct many of the students in every class. And, of course you can use teacher modelling.

If you can plan ahead you could give students vocabulary study for homework on words that will be used in your next lesson's speaking practice activities.

AGIC are you using an IELTS textbook? For the IELTS speaking component, besides talking about such topics as self and family in a conversational way, the other major component requires that the learner thinks of ideas and then quickly organises a short response to an impromtu topic. i.e. 'brainstorming' You can do many types of activities based on this section as extensions to other parts of your lessons too. e.g. Wh- questions based on a reading.

For the OP. I think it's been long known that native Chinese language is processed in different parts of the brain to native English language. For Chinese I believe it is because it has an ideographic (somewhat pictographic) written script. Is that the case for second language learning too? What about verbal language only? The blind?

It's really interesting to hear about the differences in perception. I don't think I've encountered that information before.

LFA

[Surfdude18]

Since Chinese is based on pictograms rather than letters, it's hard to see how dyslexia could exist here in quite the same way. Indeed, I looked up the word in the dictionary and showed it to my wife, and she said it just meant 'stupid'...

[AussieGuyInChina]

Thanks for your suggestion Anda. However, the program is both intensive and solemn. No matter how well I could argue the benefits of showing movies, or parts thereof, I would be out on my ear if I used precious class time showing DVDs.

LF, the students do impromptu speeches - topics selected at random, 1 minute to prepare and then speak for 3 minutes. That's not their shortcoming.

The students seem to suffer from a form of reading dyslexia (their writing is okay). For example, I could introduce the word hypochondria and the students would be able to repeat it back to me. Most of them would understand the explanation that I provide (others would be checking their electronic dictionary even before I finished speaking).

If hypochondria appeared in a reading out loud exercise 2 or 3 days later, my students wouldn't be able to pronounce it. A typical attempt would be,something like, hy - hy - hypo - hypochon ('ch' not 'k').

The article that arioch36 posted indicates that Chinese students are not learning how to pronounce words; they are memorizing pronunciation.

I should point out that the reading material I present does not use phonetic symbols (which I know the students have memorized). When the students bring their own (China-published) IELTS preparation books into class, which use phonetic symbols, they're able to read and pronounce words.

However, the microeconomics / macroeconomics / accounting text books used in the diploma program do not use phonetic symbols (nor do real-world English language documents) and so the students need to develop an ability to self-determine (sound out) word pronunciation.

Trying to learn pronunciation of English words by memorization would not only be very taxing on the brain but would also require repetition. Of course, many English words are low-frequency so repetition would not occur 'naturally'.

I need to find a way to help the students make the transition from assisted-pronunciation (text contains phonetic symbols) to self-determined pronunciation.

[arioch36]

It sounds like you can not do songs in class? Because when we sing, another part of our brain, much more of our brain is used. And to sound like "un" for a moment, the use of emotion. I try to get my students to get overly dramatic when they read, to get the emotional part of the brain into play.
I can't say that it is much help, or they I am an expert in doing this. You can be. But I certainly know that you want more of the brain activated, and emotion has strong power for memory retrieval and engaging the "Automatic" or "unconscious" systems of the brain, because , of course, our ideal is for the students to become good enough that they are not "consciously" thinking of what they are saying.

And of course, if it is an standard IELTS class, the biggest challenge is to get them to learn english instead of studying how to trick the tester

[Anda]

Use this method:

1 - 10 of about 1,980,000 for pronunciation syllables english

http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/word-stress-1.htm

word number of syllables
dog dog 1
green green 1
quite quite 1
quiet qui-et 2
orange or-ange 2
table ta-ble 2
expensive ex-pen-sive 3
interesting in-ter-est-ing 4
realistic re-al-is-tic 4
unexceptional un-ex-cep-tion-al 5
........................................................................................

What is Word Stress?
In English, we do not say each syllable with the same force or strength. In one word, we accentuate ONE syllable. We say one syllable very loudly (big, strong, important) and all the other syllables very quietly.

Let's take 3 words: photograph, photographer and photographic. Do they sound the same when spoken? No. Because we accentuate (stress) ONE syllable in each word. And it is not always the same syllable. So the shape of each word is different.

click word to hear shape total
syllables stressed
syllable
PHO TO GRAPH 3 #1
PHO TO GRAPH ER 4 #2
PHO TO GRAPH IC 4 #3

This happens in ALL words with 2 or more syllables: TEACHer, JaPAN, CHINa, aBOVE, converSAtion, INteresting, imPORtant, deMAND, etCETera, etCETera, etCETera

The syllables that are not stressed are �weak� or �small� or �quiet�. Native speakers of English listen for the STRESSED syllables, not the weak syllables. If you use word stress in your speech, you will instantly and automatically improve your pronunciation and your comprehension.

Try to hear the stress in individual words each time you listen to English - on the radio, or in films for example. Your first step is to HEAR and recognise it. After that, you can USE it!

There are two very important rules about word stress:

One word, one stress. (One word cannot have two stresses. So if you hear two stresses, you have heard two words, not one word.)
The stress is always on a vowel.

[Mister Al]

Spray painted on a wall Dyslexia rules ko

[eslstudies]

A dyslexic guy walks into a bra.

Seriously though, Intime started a thread on this topic last year, complete with several interesting links. One suggested that Chinese students are generally better mathematicians than their alphabet literate peers from the West, because the part of their brain that computates also handles their reading and writing, and so is more thoroughly developed. The maths faculty at my school, where we have a number of Chinese students, were very interested.

The above is purely a lay explanation, btw.

[11:59]

[arioch36]

11:59

[Surfdude18]

And let's not mention the ridiculously authoritarian way that they force left-handed children to become right-handed...

[arioch36]

PS,

The main point isn't that dyslexia exists in Chinese, but that it effects different parts of the brain, meaning that what is standard .. not treatment, what's the word...standard adaptive techniques used in the west may not be the best method for chinese with the problems

[Lobster]

My other gripe, if I may digress, is the lack of attention paid to speech impediments and vision problems. This year I seem to have an inordinate number of lisping students and short-sighted students without glasses. Nobody seems to even notice. There certainly isn't anything done to help them. Now, if dyslexia is affecting different parts of the brain in Chinese and English readers, would that suggest that a Chinese reader who's dyslexic would have no problems with English. I once worked with a guy who could only read by looking in a mirror, and another who could read words that were raised (e.g. plastic letters), but couldn't read printed materials.

RED