"Once you have been speaking a second language for years, it’s too late to change your pronunciation"

David Nguyen, originally from Vietnam, moved to Canada in 1980, a time when many Vietnamese people were fleeing their country. David was an engineer and, although it took a long time and a lot of hard work, his credentials were eventually recognized, and he was hired in a large engineering firm. His professional skills were very strong, but his employers often complained that they had difficulty understanding him, despite the fact that he had taken several ESL courses when he first arrived and had a good grasp of both spoken and written English. The problem, as they put it, was his “heavy accent.” Sixteen years after his arrival in Canada, David enrolled in a Clear Speaking course offered two evenings a week for twelve weeks at a local college. Along with his classmates, he received instruction intended to make him more intelligible. On the first night, the students were invited to participate in a study that would entail collecting samples of their English pronunciation at the beginning and end of the course. Like David, the other students had all been in Canada for extensive periods of time; the average length of stay was ten years. They were all well educated and ranged from high intermediate to very advanced in terms of English proficiency. Each student agreed to record speech samples in the first and last weeks of the course; they were offered an honorarium at the end of the study.

What the Research Says

What could David, after 16 years of living in an English-speaking city in Canada, realistically expect from thirty-six hours of instruction over twelve weeks? The conventional wisdom about immigrants like David is quite discouraging. A widespread assumption is that he would have fossilized, a term coined by Selinker (1972) to describe the process undergone by a second language (L2) speaker who is unlikely to show improvement in certain forms of the target language, regardless of instruction. Selinker’s proposal is supported by a number of early pronunciation studies. Oyama (1976), for instance, examined the pronunciation of 60 Italian immigrants to the United States. Their ages on arrival ranged from six to twenty years, and they had lived in the U.S. for five to eighteen years. Two linguistically trained judges assessed their accentedness on a five-point scale. Oyama found that the immigrants who arrived at later ages had much stronger foreign accents than those who had come at an earlier age. Interestingly, length of time in the U.S. made no significant difference to degree of accentedness. Oyama concluded that pronunciation instruction in an L2 should take place when learners are young. Her finding has often been interpreted as indicating that older learners don’t benefit from pronunciation instruction; in other words, they have “fossilized.”

Another interpretation of fossilization is connected to the length of time an L2 learner has spent in the target language community. Research on naturalistic development of L2 pronunciation patterns has shown that experience in the second language environment does indeed have some impact on pronunciation, even though it is quite small. Moreover, most changes in the direction of the target language tend to occur within the first year in the second language environment (Flege, 1988; Munro & Derwing, 2008). These findings, along with those of Oyama (1976), suggest that L2 learners’ productions will fossilize after even a relatively short period of residence in their new language environment. Thus, fossilization has been tied to both age and length of residence. Older learners are considered to have more diffi- culty modifying their L2 speech, and learners who have resided in the target language community for more than a year are considered to be likely candidates for fossilization.

Read on…

http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472035168-myth1.pdf

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WB Yeats: How to read a poem.

The Nobel Prize laureate WB Yeats was born 150 years ago this June. Poet Nick Laird analyses his unique reading style and describes the challenges of performing verse.

I once read in Dublin with a poet who turned up with what looked like a small wooden suitcase. It turned out to be a sort of buttonless accordion, which, as she read each poem, she slowly opened out to 90 degrees, playing a constant low atonal wheezing throughout. I was surprised – though not as surprised as at a poetry festival in Herefordshire when another contemporary burst into a passionate folk song after she’d read her first piece, a sequence she repeated for the rest of her set. The entire audience – all four of them – went mad for it, though I did subsequently find they comprised her immediate family.

Poets read their poems in all kinds of styles: those who are hunched and intense or relaxed and conversational, or those who hector or lecture their audience, or over-explain or apologise, or crack gags to puncture the slightly tense silence that descends in each poem’s wake. What is now rare is the kind of quavery shamanic intoning – as if summoning demons – practised by WB Yeats, who was born 150 years ago this June.

The Irish poet made a series of radio broadcasts for the BBC in the 1930s. He seemed to know even then that his reading manner was going out of style. “I am going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm, and that may seem strange if you are not used to it,” warned Yeats when introducing the Lake Isle of Innisfree in a 1931 recording. “I remember the great English poet, William Morris, coming in a rage out of some lecture hall where somebody had recited a passage out of his Sigurd the Volsung. ‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble,’ said Morris, ‘to get that thing into verse.’ It gave me the devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.”

Although all poets – at least all good ones – write in a relationship to rhythm (if not in strict iambs or dactyls or anapaests), techniques now are much more lightly demonstrated. Yeats, though, straddled many periods. He was born in the middle of Victoria’s reign, and his own work began the Celtic Twilight, those soft-focused, eerie lyrics of faeries and gods of the 1880s, but ended with a distinctly clean and modern tone and sensibility with the Last Poems of 1939.

Masters’ voices

He wrote the Lake Isle of Innisfree in 1888, when he was 23. He was on the Strand in London, he explains, when he heard “a little tinkle of water”, and stopped outside a shop where a ball was balanced on a jet of water – an advertisement for “cooling drinks” – and it set him to thinking of Sligo and lake water.

Just after Yeats was tramping down the Strand, Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson made two of the earliest audio recordings of poetry. Tennyson’s, made on a wax cylinder in 1890, has him thundering through the Charge of the Light Brigade. The poem’s short stressed dactylic lines echo the galloping horses, and at some point someone – presumably Tennyson – becomes his own Foley artist and starts a weird knocking sound, trying to imitate the noise of the hooves. Even Tennyson, it seems, was a bit worried that the words weren’t quite enough.

Robert Browning’s recording shows a similar fear of dead air, as radio producers now call it. It’s also a classic example of buckling under pressure. In 1889 he was at a dinner party thrown by his friend Rudolf Lehmann, the German artist. A sales manager for Thomas Edison’s Talking Machine, Colonel Gouraud, was also there and had brought along a phonograph. Browning agreed to recite his poem How They Brought The Good News from Ghent to Aix. Again, this is a poem about horses, and his recital has something of the jaunty, excitable tone of a Grand National commentator: “I sprang to the saddle, and Joris, and he; I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three… ” Then he forgets the lines and does something I think all poets should do if they find themselves in a similar fix: he recites his own name twice, very loudly, and then shouts out: “Hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray, hip hip hooray!”.

For crying out loud

Though both Tennyson and Browning recite their poetry with regard to the rhythm, neither have the singular incantatory oddness of Yeats, of what Heaney has called his “elevated chanting”. We might note that Yeats came to poetry through an oral tradition. He wrote, in the 1906 essay Literature and the Living Voice, that “Irish poetry and Irish stories were made to be spoken or sung, while English literature has all but completely shaped itself in the printing press.” The oral culture in Irish poetry was strong – it is strong – and there is a sense still that the poem should not just be memorable but able to be memorised.

Yeats came from the bardic tradition, in which bards were a professional caste of scholarly, highly trained craftsmen. They attended special colleges for up to seven years to master the technical requirements of syllabic verse that used assonance and half-rhyme and alliteration. The bardic poems were oral history and songs of praise, designed to propel the names of famous kings and the details of their other-worldly deeds down through the ages. The men – and they were all men – were tasked with passing on the accumulated lore of Irish history and legend, and Yeats’s speaking style has something of that eldritch gloom about it: it’s a voice intoning through a banquet hall in candlelight. He wrote, in The Coat, “I made my song a coat, / covered with embroideries / out of old mythologies…”

Although Yeats constantly remade his style throughout his writing life, trimming off the finery of Victoriana, its frills and archaic reversals, to a modern, hard-edged style – what he called “passionate, normal speech” – his formal reading manner remained in the broadcasts he made a few years before his death. And yet it’s true to say that his engagement with the medium was profound. He was at the very beginning of radio culture: the idea of audience for early Yeats was limited to either reciting to a room of faces or communing in silence with a single reader on the page. When he wrote about his radio talks, it’s clear that for Yeats the very technology brought about a new sense of intimacy.

He had previously held off reading more personal poetry. On his American tours, for example, when asked for love poetry, he would respond that he refused to read “any poem of mine which any of you can by any possible chance think an expression of my personal feelings, and certainly I will not read you love poems”. But the radio made possible for Yeats a new kind of conceptual space for reading his more private writing aloud and in public, and in the snug of the studio he was happy to whisper into the ear, as it were, of the audience. “You would all be listening singly or in twos and threes; above all that I myself would be alone, speaking to something that looks like a visiting card on a pole… it would be no worse than publishing love poems in a book.”

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From: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150422-how-to-read-a-poem  

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The benefits of a bilingual brain - Mia Nacamulli.

It’s obvious that knowing more than one language can make certain things easier — like traveling or watching movies without subtitles. But are there other advantages to having a bilingual (or multilingual) brain? Mia Nacamulli details the three types of bilingual brains and shows how knowing more than one language keeps your brain healthy, complex and actively engaged.

From: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-speaking-multiple-languages-benefits-the-brain-mia-nacamulli

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International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

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How to Teach Reported Speech: Alternative Approach.

  

Reported speech is used to talk about things other people have said. Instead of introducing this topic using a range of different tenses, stick with a very simple structure for this first lesson. “He said he liked soccer.” where both verbs are past tense, would be ideal. A lesson on reported speech is the perfect opportunity to review different structures and vocabulary.

How to Proceed

1 Warm up

Use the warm up activity to get some simple sentences on the board. You can elicit certain sentence structures if students need more practice with something in particular. You can do this by asking students to make groups and giving each group a different question to answer. This way you will get three to six sentences for each structure and can cover a range of topics. After giving students some time to discuss their questions and write individual answers, have volunteers read sentences aloud. Write some sentences and the names of the student volunteers on the board. Be sure to use at least one sentence from each group.

2 Introduce Reported Speech

You may choose to have students stay in their groups or return to their desks for the introduction. You can try to elicit the target structure by asking a question such as “What did Ben say?” Try to use a sentence that is written on the board. Most likely students will search for the name Ben and then read the sentence exactly as you have written it but you can then say “You’re right! He said he was very tired. Good job!” You have now introduced the target structure. Write the sentence He said he was very tired. on the board next to Ben’s original sentence I am very tired. Use a few more sentences from the warm up as examples and encourage students to make reported speech sentences. Now play a short game such as Crisscross with the remaining examples to give students some practice.

3 Practice

In their groups, students should trade sentences with group members and rewrite the sentences using the reported speech structure. Be sure to allow time for the majority of students to present their sentences to the class so that students can have lots of examples and some speaking practice. If students have questions, this is an excellent time to address them and review anything they are struggling with. Next use short video or audio clips for an exercise where students listen to material and complete a worksheet testing comprehension and practicing reported speech. You could also use a written dialogue for this type of activity but it will be more challenging if students have to listen to the material even if that means reading the dialogue aloud to the class. Check the answers as a class after several repetitions. If there is time, you can also play the material once more after the answers have been checked.

4 Produce

Reported speech is a great opportunity for students to do interviews with classmates, teachers or family members so this activity may be best as a homework assignment. If students have never had the opportunity to conduct interviews before, it would be good to provide them with several questions to ask. It may also be helpful to provide the translations of these questions for the interviewees.

5 Review

What students present depends on the amount of time you would like to spend on this activity. Students could either use the reported speech structure to talk about the response to one interview question or summarize their findings. This activity allows you to ensure that students are using the structure correctly. If students have difficulty with something, you can review and practice that in the warm up for the next lesson.

Being able to talk about things they have heard allows students to share more information. It is one thing to say what you think and totally different to talk about what other people have said. This will definitely be practiced further when you talk about giving advice because often someone will prompt advice giving by saying something like “I want to/think ~ but my parents said ~.” Covering this topic thoroughly now will give students the confidence to create this section of dialogue in giving advice dialogues and role plays later on.

See our Reported Speech worksheets here.

From: BusyTeacher.org

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How to Teach Question Structures.

Teachers often give students plenty of time to practice answering questions without dedicating sufficient practice time to asking them. For example, Crisscross is a very simple warm up activity where students answer questions such as “How’s the weather?” but after nearly a year of doing this activity, students may struggle to come up with the correct question for the answer “It’s sunny!” Students can become accustomed to hearing key words in questions, in this case weather, and answering correctly without paying any attention to the question’s structure.

Here are some ideas to help students focus on this more.

So, How Do I Teach Question Structures?

1 INTRODUCE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS TOGETHER

During the introduction of new materials, you can ask the target question when trying to elicit vocabulary. This way, students will hear it while they are focusing on the structure of the answer and after practicing the target answer you can go back and do some pronunciation practice with the question too. Question and answer structures are normally introduced together because for example “How’s the weather?” and “It’s ~.” are a pair and learning one without the other is not very beneficial.

2 PRACTICE THEM TOGETHER, TOO

Practice activities should also include both structures. For speaking practice this is easy because interview activities and model dialogues will certainly include both. Written exercises usually make students focus on answering the questions and not on the questions themselves. For structures where students have to compose their own responses such as “What’s your favorite sport?” it makes sense that students would be more concerned with what they should say in response. On quizzes, exams, and in real life however, students are going to need to be able to ask as well as answer questions so include some activities that draw attention to a question’s word order. You can do this by adding a section of answers where students have to write the question for each answer. If this is too challenging you can have students match questions with answers or, better yet, fill in blanks within the question. These exercises will help students practice question structures more extensively.

3 PRODUCTION STAGE

During production exercises, questions are usually provided so that students have some guidelines or organization for their activities. Model dialogues and role-plays can be adapted to give students more practice forming questions. You can also play Fruit Basket by asking the student in the middle to say a question and having everyone who would answer “Yes” change seats. Example questions might be “Do you like blue? Have you eaten sushi? Are you a student?” This can be used for many different question structures and levels. You could play Fruit Basket as a review activity at the end of the first lesson using the answer structure and as a warm up in the next lesson using the question structure. Students may struggle at first but the more familiar they are with asking questions the easier it will be for them to learn new ones.

4 FOCUS ON QUESTION WORDS

Make questions part of general review material and activities before exams or quizzes by dedicating a section to them. If you have a study guide for students, make sure that students write their answers to questions as well as complete the questions. This will make them more aware of often overlooked words in questions. For “How’s the weather?” students may be tempted to say something similar to “What weather?” as the target question because many questions in beginning and intermediate English lessons start with what and because they recognize the word weather as the word that links it to the answer. When creating blanks in the questions, leave in words such as weather and focus more on who, what, where, when, why, and how as well as words such as your in questions like “What’s your favorite sport?” When conducting review games, you can include a section where students have to give the question for the answer provided. This may be the most challenging section of the game so awarding extra points for correct answers may be appropriate.

While many classes concentrate on having students answer questions, real life does not work this way.

Students are going to have to be able to both ask and answer questions when given the opportunity to speak English outside the classroom so teachers need to devote plenty of time to question related activities. Once your lesson plans start including more of these, students will have better success remembering and using questions.

From: BusyTeacher.org

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What’s goof off?

Sometimes we want to spend some time doing nothing. There is no problem about it, right?

Do you know what goof off is? 

Read some definitions I have found on other websites:

TO GOOF OFF IS…

(v.) To slack off by wasting time idly, sometimes through electronic means like video games, or through alcohol, doing absolutely nothing, or sleeping excessively. To goof off is to pass the time through the most unproductive means possible. (See here)

(North American English, informal) to spend your time doing nothing, especially when you should be working. (See here)

Read some examples:

You’d better not let the boss catch you goofing off! (See here)

I completely goofed off in college, devoting my life to slime volleyball, Soul Calibur 3, and ultimate frisbee instead of academics. Now I'm a level 3 barbarian living in a shack by a tucked away creek in Intercourse, Pennsylvania. It was totally worth it.

I totally goofed off. It's three in the morning and I'm still reading.

To goof off is to live life to the fullest.

Now that you know what goof off is, it is time to go back to work, right?

See you around!

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What's the Difference between The Legend of Sleepy Hollow the Book and Sleepy Hollow the Movie?

In the Book:

Ichabod Crane is a schoolteacher in Tarry Town.

The place where Crane and the townspeople reside is called Greensburgh, or Tarry Town. Sleepy Hollow is a nearby valley.

Crane is an extremely superstitious man whose indulging in tales of the supernatural often leads to him being scared at night.

The story ends with Crane being attacked by the Horseman, then going missing.

Crane is inspired to court Katrina by her beauty as well as her family's wealth.

The Horseman's head is rumored to have been taken off by a cannonball.

  After Crane disappears, Brom Bones marries Katrina.

In the Movie:

Crane is a constable from New York who goes to Sleepy Hollow to investigate a series of murders.

Sleepy Hollow is the name of the town.

Crane is presented as a skeptic who relies on scientific methods to solve the murders.

About a third into the film, Crane is chased by a fake Horseman revealed to be Brom in disguise. Crane is surprised, but simply goes on to continue his work.

Crane does not initially pursue Katrina's affections, and is not shown to be materialistically interested when he does.

The Horseman was decapitated with a sword.

Brom is killed by the Horseman. In the end, Katrina moves to New York with Crane.  

http://thatwasnotinthebook.com/diff/the-legend-of-sleepy-hollow-vs-sleepy-hollow/0#diffPage 

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More than A B C: 6 Approaches to Answering Multiple Choice Questions.

I remember taking my first multiple choice exam in Kindergarten.

It was for standardized testing, and I took similar exams many times between that day and the day I finished twelfth grade. And then when I started teaching, I was the one giving multiple choice tests to my students. I’m not here to discuss the merits and maladies of multiple choice tests, because they do have both. I am here to tell you that you can use multiple choice questions in your classroom in creative ways that will benefit your students even more than just choosing from A, B, C, or D. So if you have some multiple choice questions handy, try one of these easy exercises with your ESL students to keep things interesting and still learn about the English language.

6 Approaches to Answering Multiple Choice Questions

1 GET A MOVE ON

One big challenge ESL teachers often face is getting their students moving during class. This marriage of multiple choice questions and the game Stations will get your students moving and working through the questions, too. Start by assigning each wall of your room the letters A through D (for multiple choice questions with four answer options). Then read your students a multiple choice question. It’s even better if you can project the question and its answer options on a wall in your room. Once students have their answer, they dash to the appropriate wall and place their hand on its surface. You will be able to quickly see who gets each answer right and wrong, and your students will be able to get some of their energy out in a productive way.

2 QUESTIONS IN REVERSE

Giving your students multiple choice questions without their answers is an easy activity, but why not change things up even more. Give your students the multiple answers to several questions, and then have them work with one or two others to write the questions. Since students will be writing different questions with different answer choices as the correct ones, you can have your students exchange their papers after the questions are written and have them complete the questions.

3 CAN’T GET ENOUGH

This challenging activity is fun for students as they write their own wrong answers to multiple choice questions. Start with your class sitting in a circle. Give each person a unique numbered multiple choice question written on the flap of an envelope. Inside, provide two possible (handwritten) answers to the question. Students should write the number of the question at the top of their paper along with their answer choice. Then, each person writes another possible answer on a slip of paper and puts in in the envelope along with the other two. Students then pass the envelopes to the person on their left. Now students read the new question and choose the right answer from the slips inside the envelope before adding another possible answer. Continue answering questions and adding possible answers until the questions return to their first owners. As a class, review the correct answers to each question and discuss whether it became more difficult to answer once there were more options to choose from for each question.

4 PIECING THINGS TOGETHER

Can your students tell which right and wrong answers go to each question? You will see in this mixed up way of tackling multiple choice questions. Starting with typical multiple choice questions, create a puzzle for your students. Separate each question from its set of answers. For example, if you have ten questions, you would also have ten separate sets of answers to choose from. Students then work in groups of two or three to match the right answer sets to the right questions. As they do, they will have to determine the answers to the questions. They won’t know until they have matched all ten whether they chose the correct set for each question.

5 THE ANSWER IS…

Have you tried giving your students multiple choice questions with the correct answers already marked? You can do this and still get learning benefits from the activity. Rather than choosing the correct answer, have students explain why each of the other options is incorrect. This will teach them how to analyze options in a multiple choice setting and should enable them to eliminate answers when they are faced with future multiple choice questions.

6 SPELL IT OUT

You can create a puzzle for your students to solve as they answer multiple choice questions. Your students will choose the correct answers whose letters will spell out a secret word. Take a set of standard multiple choice questions, and change the letters of each correct answer to spell a word. Your word will need as many letters as multiple choice questions you have. Then change the letters of the other answers for each question. So instead of having A, B, C, and D as choices for every question, you may give students a choice between W, K, E, and G for one question and H, M, I, and L for another. Before you do the activity with your class, prepare or have your students prepare a set of clothes pins with the letters A to Z. You may need multiples of certain letters depending on what word your correct answers will spell out. Then as students answer the questions, they choose the appropriate clothespin and clip it to the bottom of their paper in order. When they have finished all of the questions, their answers across the bottom of the page should spell the secret word.

Your multiple choice activities don’t have to be as straightforward as A, B, C, or D.

Try changing things up a bit with your class and see how your students become more interested and engaged. You just might find that your multiple choice activities are even easier than A, B, C.

From: BusyTeacher.org

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