Teacher Discussion Forums

The will may not be necessary, but surely it affects the meaning quite drastically. Without it, the letter is saying "Let us know if you can't keep the appointment to enable us to offer the slot to someone else and give you a new one", with it the letter says "...enable us to offer the slot to someo...

Grammatically, how is this different from any other make someone/something do construction? The wind made the tree fall over = The wind caused the tree to fall over The teacher made the kids do lines = The teacher caused the kids to do lines The dress makes her look fat = The dress causes her to loo...

During the first year of my linguistics degree we were told that /b/, /p/ etc were !"oral stops" and /m/, /n/ etc were "nasal stops". In the second year "nasal stops" became "nasals" and "oral stops" became "plosives". Not sure why they did this, maybe it was to make us aware that the place of artic...

I certainly think it's the case that new ideas can be acceptaed far too uncritically by practitioners and policymakers: NLP, Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles immediately spring to mind. But I don't see that as having being a problem with Applied Linguistics, but rather a failure by teacher...

I recall various demonstration from the Phonetics component of my Linguistics degree where a mask was placed over a volunteer's mouth and nose to measure airflow, with a microphone or electrodes on the throat to measure voicing. This made it possible to accurately measure when plosives were released...

With stops, there can be no voicing (there's no air flow) in the build up/initial release stage, so I don't like the "halfway through" idea. It's more during the "follow through" stage that the voicing kicks in. It's a short period, but definitely measurable. In French and Spanish, as you rightly p...

But my initial argument is that d isn't voiced, it just lacks aspiration, so I'd like to find a rephrasing of lol's argument! (and anyway, since a U.S medial t is "voiced" you would have to explain the vowel length depending on the theoretical underlying form and not the actual "voicing" ) As to th...

The existence of allophones raises the question of "what's the underlying form?". Is it aspirated /p/ or unaspirated? That's why during the final year of my Linguistics degree, the phonetics lecturers started calling into question whether phonemes actually existed, or whether it's more accurate to t...

Trauma to Life

What you get in a dictionary can be a kind of hybrid between the phonetic and the phonemic. For example, I've often seen the /r/ in car presented as a kind of diacritic to reflect the fact that many British English speakers don't pronounce it unless followed by a vowel. If you were to put in all the...

My point about aspiration and voiceless consonants was that the sounds are allophones; /p/, /t/ and /k/ are realised at the surface in different ways depending on the phonological environment. Their voiced equivalents are still different, though. If you recorded someone uttering the words beach, d1c...

Aspiration can't be the distinguishing feature either. The /k/ in skill , the /p/ in speech and the /t/ in stick aren't aspirated - if you don't believe me, say the words with a sheet of paper in front of your mouth and see how much it moves. In fact, if you record a native speaker saying the words,...

For me, Agassi participated in Wimbledon = he participated in the competition we usually refer to as "Wimbledon", while Agassi participated at Wimbledon = he participated in something that was taking place in a place called Wimbledon - probably the tennis competition (as we know he's a tennis player...

Yeah, well I did quite a bit of fanning myself. He probably wouldn't have been number one poster if you and I hadn't insisted on not letting him have the last word, but it probably pushed us up the table too! What I wonder is if anyone else bothered to read the threads after the first couple of pages.

Without wanting ot be too disrespectful to iain, it strikes me as the question a bean-counting senior manager would ask. A lot will depend on whether your one-hour lesson's aims are primarily lexical, structural, phonological, skills based or whatever. There's probably an upper limit to how many lex...