Adult or aDULT?

To what extent are teachers seen as models in (foreign) language pronunciation learning?

Very recently, I asked this question on my profile on Quora (read it here). A few people provided me with very interesting answers.

As I imagine that you guys would not take some time in order to read it all, I have selected some of them to show you.

I have changed the names of the commentators (Quorans as they are known, I guess). Anyway, I am going to call them ‘Quoran’.

Quoran #1:

In my personal experience, both as a learner of English, French and Mandarin as secondary languages, and as an ESL educator, the extent is huge.

A teacher who uses a clear, standard pronunciation of the language being taught gives the students the opportunity to assimilate the language aurally in ways that a non-native, or non-standard speaker of that same language would not. This doesn't mean that native speakers are immediately the best teachers, by any means. There are superior ESL teachers (or of other foreign languages) who aren't native or don't have a native pronunciation, whose skills lie in delivery of instruction, design of purposeful activities, use of meaningful multimedia tools -for example, use of audiovisual materials of high educational value that do use native or standard pronunciation- and a wide range of knowledge about the mechanics of the language.

Well trained teachers make an immense difference. I say this from having experienced the ESL industry in China, which values native speakers, often over well qualified teachers with non-native accents. That said, a hard, unclear or incorrect accent is setting a foundation of the same quality for the students when it comes to their oral proficiency.

Accents aren't everything, but they make a difference in the way a person is received in conversation with a native speaker of the language. Learning incorrect pronunciations or erroneously stressed syllables hamper the clarity of the speaker's message. This, in my opinion, is why a teacher with a clear and correct accent makes a huge difference.

Quoran #2:

I have no experience in teaching. What I do have is experience in learning, and giving support to my children with their homework.

In my POV, I would say a teacher is a model if the student has had little to no previous contact with the language they are learning.

A few generations ago, it was definitely more prevalent: if a teacher had poor pronunciation, the students would follow. And, since in my country there was a time when many people didn't have the opportunity to travel abroad for leisure, those students who would become teachers themselves and never had direct contact with speakers of the language they were (supposed to be) teaching, the problem would carry on over and over.

Now, with TV and the internet, things happen differently. Not only parents (of children who are now attending school) are likely to have had more contact with foreign languages, but children themselves can listen to those languages through several different media. So, they can detect when the teacher speaks differently from what they had previously heard.

Both my children had, on occasion, come across such discrepancy* in English classes, and they both came to me for clarification. I told them to ignore the pronunciation and focus on the rest, since the teachers were fully prepared to help them.

I believe they did as told, since both achieved high grades in English.

French, on the other hand, is a whole other battle...

[Disclaimer]

I have my own not-so-positive view on foreign languages curriculum (public middle and high school) in my country. Kids who rely only in school classes to learn a foreign language come out totally unprepared to have a conversation in said language.

* - in Portugal, only TV series targeted at preschoolers (and some Disney channel series) are dubbed. At the cinema, animation movies are shown in both versions: dubbed/original. Series and movies meant for teenage and/or adult viewers are never dubbed.

Quoran #3:

Personally I've witnessed two teachers of Spanish who were born in America and who had awful American accents.  There tongues flapped around in their mouths like pieces of liver.  The low income schools were they worked apparently had trouble finding fully qualified Hispanics to teach.  I first learned Spanish pronunciation from Senora Olga Lugo de Bejerano fresh from Castro's Cuba in 1966.  She could barely speak English... so we got the real deal.  Did you know that you must learn to roll your R's before puberty sets in... or you will never be able to pronounce "arroz" (i.e. rice) property?

Quoran #4:

Not really sure about "teachers". I learned English phonics from a book and through referring to my immersion in both Canadian and British speakers from TV. My English could still use a lot of work. But I modeled my pronunciation from "hearing" the text in a novel being read by my ideal speaker in my head. Sounds rather convoluted, but no one in my family spoke English well back then and I had little exposure to English other than TV and radio. We didn't have the Internet back then. Things have changed a lot since. I am sure if someone wants to learn a foreign language now, they have no shortage of sites or resources to go to.

Quoran #5:

Generally students tend to copy their teachers when doing something that is unfamiliar with them.

For example, for me, English is a second language even though I've known it practically my whole life. My first English teacher was a Canadian and one of the things I picked up on was the famous Canadian "eh". I had that teacher for less than a year a long long time ago yet I still use that at the end of my sentences.

So because of my personal experiences, I believe students look at their teachers as the sole model for pronunciation when learning a new language, particularly when they have no other means of hearing that language.

Quoran #6:

I'd say it REALLY depends on the teacher and the language you're learning. I know most about teachers who teach English as the student's second (And in sometimes third) language. I've had 6 or 7 different teachers in English and one had a very strong British accent, Her motto was "It isn't English if it isn't British!"

Another teacher had some kind of American accent which was kinda hard to understand.

Most of my teachers has surprisingly enough had a VERY thick Danish accent (You should note that I'm from Denmark so the origin of it isn't a mystery), and I simply couldn't take them serious.

Once again I had a Spanish teacher who sounded like she'd lived in Spain her entire life (At least to me even though I've never been to Spain).

I'd say that teachers don't always set the best example for the pronunciation either as some teachers can have problems pronouncing words. My current English teacher for example pronounce a mix between a 's' and a 'd' sound when she pronounces the 'th'.

Quoran #7:

Interesting question yet I do not recall any research/poll on this topic.

Note - there are 3 things involved

- how pupils see a teacher as a pronunciation model (power-distance of a given culture/school) //which is bigger than

- how their teacher's pronunciation gets mimicked in reality //which is bigger than

- how their teacher's pronunciation gets embedded in pupils' own accents.

I think that naturally the last point matters and that it is given at 80% by the exposure time and 20% by the intentions and/or relationships So if the school is in London or pupils can watch many movies or shows or there are more teachers at once or one after another, the particular teacher's speech pattern won't influence the pupil's one much.

Quoran #8:

To a great extent, I'm afraid. I used to teach Spanish, and one of my classmates in college spoke like John Wayne! His pronunciation was just awful, and I had to listen to it in class after class. I even asked an instructor privately why she didn't work with him on it, and she told me it wasn't a priority because he was easily comprehensible!

Make no mistake. Students use their teachers as a guide. Where you lead, they will follow. To this day, I fear for his students.

Quoran #9:

In my opinion, it has alot to do with the student. Back when I was at high school for example, my English was fairly good, I learned from reading comics and watching movies and sitcoms, so when my teacher pronounced a word incorrectly I would be aware of it.

Some of my classmates however, were novice English learners, thus, they would take after their teacher in whatever he says. Similarly, I would probably follow my teacher as model for pronunciation in Japanese, but then again, I'm always skeptical, especially if I doubted that my teacher is not reliable.

Quoran #10:

If they face the students in the right way (depending on what the students need to see) and explain the movements of the mouth, tongue and so on well enough, then we might actually be able to see how to pronounce the sounds properly. However, it has been my personal experience, that to really learn how to pronounce a language flawlessly (in many, but not all cases), requires a speech therapist who can teach where the tongue should be placed and can teach the finer nuances of pronunciation. They just tend to know more about the finer nuances of the mouth and what it does to get the sound.

Quoran #11:

When I began learning English as a junior one student at 13, my teacher did not taught us anything of phonetics, it caused a serious result that many of us did not know how to pronounce every phonetic accurately. Even now, there are still some English sounds that I can not pronounce. It is my next goal to solve this problem. Back to your question, the pronunciation level of English teachers I met varied. Tape is actually  the best model.

Quoran #12:

If the teacher is responsible for the education of the student In said foreign language, they have the responsibility to also teach correct pronounciation/enunciation. A large part of learning a language ( maybe the largest) is the ability to speak it correctly.

Quoran #13:

They teach the student how to speak in that language.

Say they are teaching Spanish

One teacher learned in Spain

One teacher learned in Mexico

They will teach two very different accents in the language.

The teacher that learned in Spain will pronounce C in some words as th so Gracias sounds like Grathias.

The teacher who learned in Mexico would pronounce C as C or see sound so Gracias would sound like Gracias.

Quoran #14:

If the student is not able to distinguish the letters, then the teacher has 100% impact on students' pronunciation. But as the students grow older and get familiar with reading letters, the role of teacher decreases to sat 60-70 percent.

Quoran #15:

Teachers may be the only models a student has until the advent of Internet and Youtube and Google.  Once you find you tube, you get a varied number of speaking models.

Quoran #16:

Teachers are often authorative to students, especially when the students know little about what the teacher is teaching.

Quoran #17:

Unless a person has access to their materials (native speaking friends, videos, audio) a teacher maybe the only thing the person hears.

As you can see, there is no right or wrong answer for my questions. Would you like to help me find more answer?

To what extent are teachers seen as models in (foreign) language pronunciation learning?

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Can you supply the one word that makes sense of each sentence?

It’s the end of the world (as we know it) and kids are doing fine!

THIS POST IS INTENDED FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY!! PLEASE, LEAVE IF YOU ARE UNDER 18 YEARS OLD.

Esta postagem é INAPROPRIADA PARA MENORES DE 18 ANOS. Se você é menor de idade, por favor, existem várias postagens interessantes e apropriadas para sua idade. Peço para que não leia este texto.

Things have changed over the last few years. I can’t say that I haven’t noticed those changes because I have!

When it comes to behavior, many attitudes called my attention during the last ten years. I have seen groups of people claiming for their rights. Society has accepted those changes in different ways – on the one hand, people see no problem and just accept that things would change anyway. On the other hand, some people are still too conservative and they have not realized that we live in an ever-changing world and changes are inevitable.

Now it is possible to find people of the same sex (man-man; woman-woman) walking on the street holding hands and kissing each other very affectionately.

Women are doing what was once considered men’s jobs. In other words, women are working for companies where only men used to work for. Women are play very important roles in society. Today, it is easy to find female presidents and mayors, for instance. 

There has been the incredible growth of the Internet since 2000! Kids have mobile phones and they are connected all the time! A few people still watch TV the way they used to!

There is sex everywhere, but that is not that new, is it?

No, it is not!

What may sound weird is that children are being taught sex at schools. That’s right... Schools are teaching kids how they were generated (huh?).

Hold on… hold on…

I am not saying that… come on, have you really thought that I would say teachers are teaching children how to… ham… ham? You know what I mean, don’t you?

I have just seen this book on the internet and I found it incredibly interesting. It is a ‘childish’ (not so childish) way of telling children how women get pregnant. I would actually say ‘how their parents get pregnant’, but I’m not sure it would make many people happy!  

What you are about to see is a kind of manual named How a Baby Is Made (pictures and text by Per Holm Knudsen).

Please, do not judge this book by its cover. Take a look and try to understand its purpose.

It all boils down to an explanation about how babies are made and it goes just like this:

Here are the baby’s mother and father. They love each other very much. They have helped each other to have the baby.

When the parents are not wearing any clothes, you can see that the mother has an opening between her legs. It is called a vagina. The father has a penis and testicles.

The father’s testicles are filled with sperm cells. When he makes love, these come out of the tip of his penis. They move through the mother’s vagina into a hollow space in the mother’s abdomen called the uterus, or womb. Sometimes there is a tiny egg inside the mother, and a sperm cell joins it.

THIS POST IS INTENDED FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY!! PLEASE, LEAVE IF YOU ARE UNDER 18 YEARS OLD.

Esta postagem é INAPROPRIADA PARA MENORES DE 18 ANOS. Se você é menor de idade, por favor, existem várias postagens interessantes e apropriadas para sua idade. Peço para que não leia este texto.

More pictures…

Three Secrets You Need to Know About Spoken English.

I found this talk quite interesting and since I don’t have enough time to write something for the blog at the moment, I will just share it with you all.

Judy Thompson, B.A., TESL Certification, professor, author and speaker is an expert in spoken English. A student herself of French and German, Judy knows firsthand the frustrations of learning to speak a new language. Judy lived and taught in South Korea and it was there that she had the first of many revelations about spoken English and how it should be taught.

Newcomers are embarrassed about their accents and grammar mistakes and native speakers are unaware that the way they speak makes it extremely difficult for non-native speakers to understand them.

Judy leads language classes for both native and non-native speakers to foster understanding and effective communication in our diverse community.

A long time resident of Caledon, Ontario, Judy has four children and lives with her husband Richard on a beautiful ten-acre hobby farm. She is an environmental activist who enjoys hiking and skiing. In her spare time, she raises champion hunter show ponies.

I hope you have enjoyed as much as I have.

See you around!

PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.

Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!

Did you spot a typo?

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WHY I TAUGHT MYSELF 20 LANGUAGES — AND WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT MYSELF IN THE PROCESS

I always wanted to know how it would be like to speak several languages. Well, by ‘several’ I do not mean twenty, but that’s exactly what this guys can do: he can spe…. Ops… speaks 20 languages. I mean, can he speak 20 languages?

This is the story of Timothy Doner, a Harvard freshman who received notoriety for studying more than 20 languages.

He spends much of his time attempting to perfect his linguistic skills in different neighborhoods of New York City.

His Youtube channel, PolyglotPal, has received more than 5 million hits. He spoke at TEDxTeen in 2014.

Read on… 

During the past few years, I’ve been referred to in the media as “The World’s Youngest Hyperpolyglot” — a word that sounds like a rare illness. In a way it is: it describes someone who speaks a particularly large number of foreign languages, someone whose all-consuming passion for words and systems can lead them to spend many long hours alone with a grammar book.

But while it’s true that I can speak in 20 different languages, including English, it took me a while to understand that there’s more to language than bartering over kebabs in Arabic or ordering from a menu in Hindi. Fluency is another craft altogether.

I began my language education at age thirteen. I became interested in the Middle East and started studying Hebrew on my own. For reasons I still don’t quite understand, I was soon hooked on the Israeli funk group Hadag Nachash, and would listen to the same album every single morning. At the end of a month, I had memorized about twenty of their songs by heart — even though I had no clue what they meant. But once I learned the translations it was almost as if I had downloaded a dictionary into my head; I now knew several hundred Hebrew words and phrases — and I’d never had to open a textbook.

I decided to experiment. I spent hours walking around my New York City neighborhood, visiting Israeli cafés to eavesdrop on people’s conversations. Sometimes, I would even get up the courage to introduce myself, rearranging all of the song lyrics in my head into new, awkward and occasionally correct sentences. As it turned out, I was on to something.

I moved on to Arabic, which I’d study every morning by reading news headlines with a dictionary and by talking to street vendors. After that it was Persian, then Russian, then Mandarin … and about fifteen others. On an average day, I’d Skype with friends in French and Turkish, listen to Hindi pop music for an hour and eat dinner with a Greek or Latin book on my lap. Language became an obsession, one that I pursued in summer classes, school, web forums and language meet-ups around the city.

By March of 2012, media outlets such as the BBC and The New York Times featured stories about me, “The Teen Who Speaks 20 Languages!” For a while, it was a fantasy; it made what many thought of as a bizarre hobby seem (almost) mainstream, and gave me a perfect opportunity to promote language learning.

After a while, though, my media “moments” felt more like gruesome chores than opportunities to spread the word. Most news shows were interested only in the “dancing bear” act (“You wanna learn more about the Middle East? Cool… Say ‘you’re watching Channel 2’ in Arabic!”) As lighthearted as that might have been, it left me with an uncomfortably personal lesson in modern media: when the goal is simply to get the viewers’ attention, the real importance of a story often gets lost in translation.

When I was beginning to discover languages, I had a romanticized view of words like “speak” and “fluency”. But then I realized that you can be nominally fluent in a language and still struggle to understand parts of it. English is my first language, but what I really spoke was a hybrid of teenage slang and Manhattan-ese. When I listen to my father, a lawyer, talk to other lawyers, his words sound as foreign to me as Finnish. I certainly couldn’t read Shakespeare without a dictionary, and I’d be equally helpless in a room with Jamaicans or Cajuns. Yet all of us “speak English.”

My linguistics teacher, a native of Poland, speaks better English than I do and seems right at home peppering his speech with terms like “epenthetic schwa” and “voiceless alveolar stops”. Yet the other day, it came up that he’d never heard the word “tethered”. Does that mean he doesn’t “speak” English? If the standard of speaking a language is to know every word — to feel equally at home debating nuclear fission and classical music — then hardly anyone is fluent in their own native tongues.

Reducing someone to the number of languages he or she speaks trivializes the immense power that language imparts. After all, language is the living testament to a culture’s history and world view, not a shiny trophy to be dusted off for someone’s self-aggrandizement.

Language is a complex tapestry of trade, conquest and culture to which we each add our own unique piece — whether that be a Shakespearean sonnet or “Lol bae g2g ttyl.” As my time in the media spotlight made me realize, saying you “speak” a language can mean a lot of different things: it can mean memorizing verb charts, knowing the slang, even passing for a native. But while I’ve come to realize I’ll never be fluent in 20 languages, I’ve also understood that language is about being able to converse with people, to see beyond cultural boundaries and find a shared humanity. And that’s a lesson well worth learning.

From http://ideas.ted.com/why-i-learned-20-languages-and-what-i-learned-about-myself-in-the-process/  

PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.

Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!

Did you spot a typo?

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The majority of self-made millionaires have a similar approach to earning money.

If you have some time to spare, read this post. I believe you guys will like it!

"Keep all your eggs in one basket, but watch that basket closely."
- Warren Buffett

Most self-made millionaires don't rely on their salaries alone to build their wealth.

This is one of Warren Buffett's most famous quotes. It is also one of the worst pieces of advice for anyone who is working on becoming rich.

My dad inadvertently took this advice with his own financial empire, and in one night lost everything when the main warehouse for his business burned down.

My dad's business was valued at around $3 million, which is north of $20 million in today's dollars. We lived in a very nice house in Todt Hill, one of the most affluent neighborhoods on Staten Island, New York. When my dad's warehouse burned to the ground, all of that wealth disappeared into thin air.

Our family struggled financially for the next 15 years, trying to recover from that nightmare; struggling almost daily to prevent foreclosure on our home.

My dad told me later in life that he wished he had his eggs in more than one basket. That would have been the smart thing to do, he told me.

In my five-year study of the daily habits of the rich and poor, I learned that most self-made millionaires generated their income from many baskets:

·          65% had three streams of income

·         45% had four streams of income

·         29% had five or more streams of income

Having multiple income streams makes a lot of sense. When one stream is negatively affected by systematic economic downturns, of which you have no control, the other streams can come to the rescue and help you survive the downturn, without seeing your lifestyle dramatically affected.

Most people are not rich. And coincidentally, most people have one stream of income — their job. If you do not save and invest your savings in assets that generate additional streams of income, and you lose your job, you could soon find you and your family living with a relative.

Putting all of your eggs in one basket is simply a recipe for financial disaster. If you put all of your eggs in one basket and that basket breaks, what do you do?

How do you create multiple streams of income?

1.   Save, save, save. Save 10-20% of your net income every year.

2.   Expand your means. Start a side business or side career that generates additional income.

3.   Create multiple baskets. Invest your savings and additional income into investments that generate passive income such as: residential rental properties, commercial rental properties, TICS, triple net leases, seasonal rentals (beach areas, ski resort areas, lake front areas), equity investments (stocks, bonds, mutual funds), annuities, permanent life insurance, royalty-generating property (timber, oil and gas), and boat rentals. If you can't do it on your own, partner with others and keep building your portfolio of assets that generate passive income.

As I mentioned, three streams of income seems to be the magic number for the self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits study, but the more income streams you can create in life, the more secure will your financial house be.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/self-made-millionaires-have-a-similar-approach-to-earning-money-2015-5#ixzz3bx4pOYcH