Histoire d'O

This is my third visit to the problematic area of sound-spelling relationships in English. As before, I'm going to try to show that the link between a written vowel and its sounds, though not perfect, is far from arbitrary. Our students can learn at the very least to make an educated guess about the pronunciation of a written word, and an educated guess about the spelling of a word they hear. I know that we do a lot of the former in class, but very little of the latter. As a language learner, I find it really useful to mentally visualise the written form of a word I hear.


Today, boy oh boy, it's O! The Big O!

This time, we're going to start modelling the pure sound. Adrian Underhill seems to favour this, rather than practicing syllables, words or phrases, at least at lower levels. I've tried this method out in class, and it does focus attention marvellously. 


So, here we go. Today we're only going to contrast two sounds:


ɒ - lock, bottle, song


əʊ - show, coat, phone


Practice this yourself first if you don't feel very comfortable with pronunciation. ;)


Make sure your students get it spot on. If you think you can get away with it, do it Silent Way style - you can mime or wave your arms around, but not a sound. This forces your students to find the sounds themselves. Search for Adrian Underhill on youTube to see a couple of extracts of him presenting sounds.


Make it clear that əʊ is a diphthong. In other words it's a sound that starts in one position and glides towards another. Note that if you're uncomfortable about finding the schwa yourself, don't hesitate to use the Standard American version ɔʊ. I've given Roy Orbison the American version below.


And that's the hard bit done!

ɔʊ prɪti: wʊmən!!!!!!!

Now that they can make a really good approximation of the sound, they'll find it easy to relate to the IPA symbols. I like to get my students practising drawing huge versions of them on the board or leftover paper.


Now write up a few transcriptions like these:


fəʊn    rəʊz    bəʊt    lɒk    sɒŋ    pɒt


Ask the students (maybe in pairs) to decide what they sound like. (Ask them not to worry about the meaning at this stage.) Elicit their versions and model/correct if you really have to. Remember you can still do it Silent Wayly.


Now do they recognise any of them?


You can give them some clues:


transport on water; a flower; something musical; a common gadget; something to keep a door closed; a container for cooking.


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Please note that I write up one or two IPA transcriptions on the board in pretty much every class, and model them, so my students will already have a minimal familiarity with IPA symbols. Simply doing this exercise I've shown here in isolation will have less impact if you don't follow up with tiny regular doses of IPA.

səʊ lɒŋ!


Oh! A footnote. This is Adrian Underhill doing his other thing...

Nothing Compares to U

In this post, I'll be looking at the relationship between the spelling and sound of the letter U, and trying to make sense of it.

This post is the second in the series that started with I Don't Claim to Be an A Student.



Have a look at this cross below, and the phonetic symbol in each part. Do you remember the sounds they represent?

Try to place each of the following words in the right quarter:

slum, curse, ruse, rush, cure, buck, sure, mule, curl, puny, fur, lure.






Your answers will depend on your own accent, but if we take RP (standard British English) as our model, we'll probably say:


/ʌ/ - slum, rush, buck
/uː/ - mule, puny, ruse
/ɜː/ - fur, curl, curse
/ɔː / - lure, sure, cure

Of course, life (and English spelling) are never THAT simple! Even with RP, there are two complications:

In the /ɔː/ part (with R and magic E) older speakers and northerners tend to say /uə/ rather than /ɔː/.

And in the /uː/ section (with magic E) it's by no means clear when we say /juː/ rather than simply /uː/.

But as discussed in the other post, I strongly feel that some fairly good rules with exceptions are a hell of a lot better than nothing at all :)

My classroom procedure is fairly simple:

On the board draw the cross and the 4 symbols. Elicit/check and practice the sounds on their own. For many many learners of English, all four sounds are absolute buggers to get right, so it may take some work and some patience on the part of everybody.

Write (or spell out) the above list of words, and simply ask the students in pairs to take a few minutes to try and place them in the right quarter. Of course, you may be able to add appropriate words from your own coursebook or notes: basically any word whose stressed syllable - or sole syllable - includes u.

If you do try it out, let me know how it goes. Lots of luck to U.

How Many Words?

I think this may be the simplest grammar/listening/visualising exercise in the world...

Having discussed or studied a topic/situation, just tell your students the following:

You're going to say some phrases - they have to count the number of words you say.

Demonstrate: 

"I've lost the car keys."

I - ve - lost - the - car - keys = six.

(Contractions like "I've" count as two.)

And all you need to do is make up a few phrases or sentences from the lesson, or related to it. Try to pronounce them as realisically as you can - really join up the words. Then ask everybody in class to say how many words were in the phrase.

"How many words? Six, Belen? Six, Alvaro? Marcos, five?

Yes, six. Well done. Do you remember them?..."


I find that just with a minute or so most lessons, learners are able to tune in a little faster. And of course you don't need any prep :)


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Naomi Epstein at Visualizing Ideas recently got me thinking on the subject of hearing: She mentioned here a persistent grammar problem for Hebrew speakers, in which she used the phrases "learners with perfect hearing" It took me a moment to remember that she teaches hearing-impaired learners, but the phrase was suggestive: As a serial language learner (4 attempts - 2 wins, 1 draw, 1 defeat), I've noticed that my own hearing takes a while to tune in to the rhythms of a new language.

And not only new languages. Over the last year or so, I've had the car radio on the classical station quite often. It's my first ever time at voluntarily listening to classical music. And I feel like a Martian living on Earth. Pretty disorientated at the beginning - there's this big nonsensical mass of music, and there are too many instruments, and just when you're getting the hang of a bit, it all stops and a totally different bit starts. And it goes on a bit, too.

But it's starting to make sense now: I feel more comfortable listening to classical music. I can listen to more pieces all the way through without getting lost. And I can listen to the classical station for longer.

I've noticed a couple of features of the "grammar" of classical music:

i) Instead of choruses, they sometimes have a little phrase coming back later in the piece, maybe played the same, maybe played a bit differently. But not much in the way of verse/chorus structures.

ii) The rhythm is often very understated or totally implied: I don't like losing the rhythm of a piece, and it happens a lot in classical music.

iii) You can expect much more drastic changes in tempo or sound or key than you would in any rock or pop or folk piece. I've learned not to be disorientated; things often return to more familiar territory a little later.

You can probably tell I've been reading in some depth on classical musicology ;)

But seriously, I get the feeling that, with some exposure to the new music of English, learners may pick up little details, consciously or otherwise. Does anybody else think so?

What sort of things might constitute the music of English?

If I may speculate wildly:

Maybe the way we really pronounce I'm and want to and because and plenty more;

Maybethewaywejus kinastringitaltogether;

Maybe the way the new information seems to come later in the sentence; (get that bit first and go back for the grammar if you need to).

Maybe the way we repeat y'know or ahmean or isslike, and learners can learn to mentally skip them, because they don't mean much.

Or whatever it may be. I don't have any intentions of bothering my students with a self-analysis, so I will instead invite you to check out Benny Lewis' blog Fluent in 3 Months for great insights, motivation and strategies for language learners. If you don't know him, his mission is to learn a new language fluently pretty much every three months. As I say, his is a great dynamic blog: part learner's diary, part tutorial, part reflection, always upbeat.

And of course, thanks to Naomi.


PS It's nice to be back!

The Magnificent Seven Ride Again

I've noticed that a post of mine, The Magnificent Seven has picked up quite a lot of views, since it was posted a couple of months back.

So, helped by my unperturbable students Lara and Fer, we've prepared a further magnificent septet for you and your class. Each of them has pronounced the same set for you. Click the link above for the in-class procedure.

 

Want to check? Fer has the solution:

And Lara has the instructions for your class:

I don't claim to be an A-student

Like the great Sam Cooke, I don't claim to be an A-student. But here goes anyway...

How would you pronounce the A vowel in these words:

flares, gravy, mask, amazing, star, lash, air, hammer, bark, lake, slay, tail, ram, grate, cart

Where would they go on this diagram?

















I'd put them into four groups, at least in standard British English:

mask, lash, hammer, ram

lake, amazing, tail, grate, gravy, slay

star cart bark

flares, air



And here's where I'd write them on the quadrant. (I won't fill each one in.)

I've been noticing more and more recently that my students seem to be under the impression that there is no correspondence between spelling and sound; that there are no rules for spelling in English. A new word comes up in class (say "slate") and when I ask my students to guess the pronunciation, it's hit-and-miss between /sleɪt/ and /slæt/, with the occasional /slaɪt/ thrown in.

I know from my brother in the UK that my 7 year old nephew is doing phonics, and I've had a look at his classbooks. So I've been trying to formulate what I "know" as a native speaker, and get students to notice the patterns more. And after looking at a collection of samples, the quadrant helps to scaffold a bit.

Now I know that this isn't the whole story of A, but it's a good start. In fact, even getting student to grasp the top half of that quadrant is a huge improvement on guesswork. Pronouncing 'flares' as /fleirz/ or 'bark' as /bærk/ is close enough for most circumstances. The r-effect can come later, IMHO.

Do you teach letter-sound relationships? If so, how? I know the spelling guru Johanna Stirling touches on phonics, but I haven't found anything like this among her copious materials. If I've missed it, Johanna, please let me know!

I ain't doin' no phonics in class.

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Trivia Corner

Standard BE is not my native accent, I hasten to add, so I still feel a bit like a learner myself when it comes to this. In Scotland, most speakers have a central /a/ and an open front /e/ replacing /ei/, not to be confused with /ɛ/.

Also there is no big r-effect, maybe because it's just a separately articulated consonant, and not a kind of diacritic.

I think most Scots would say:

BAIT:  [bet]
BET: [bɛt]
BAT: [bat]
BART: [bart]
BEARS: [berz]

Do you have a non-standard English accent? And do you teach your own pronunciation or a standard model. I'd love to know.

PS Sandy Millin has posted here a wonderful set of UK accent samples. Don't miss!

Destroy the Brain

Thursday night is zombie night. So I've decided, anyway. My evening intermediate class are going to be doing Shaun of the Dead this month.

He's got an arm off!!!!

Tonight's instalment.

Warned them they wouldn't understand much, but not to worry - there wasn't going to be a test. A watch through the first 10 minutes or so of the film, without subtitles. Were they able to tell me anything about the characters or their interactions? Bugger all, really.

Scripts of scene one handed out. We read it several times, changing roles. Speaking slowly but as much acted as possible, reading for emotive content. Worked informally on linking and emphasis, especially on pronouncing phrases, not words. Developed the idea of Liz's frustration with Shaun. Then watched the relevant scene once more, again without subs.

Ditto with two more scenes.

All the scenes we read are from the first few minutes, in which the dynamics between the characters are established: Shaun is a thirtyish underachiever frittering his life away in a dead-end job. His flatmate/landlord Pete and longsuffering girlfriend Liz both berate his laziness and his attachment to the porcine, disfunctional Ed, long-term potato on their couch.

Mission accomplished? I think so far so good. When the hour was up, my protegés had made modest progress with really dense, rapid, colloquial English, both in production and reception. They had got a handle on the character dynamics, which are really the key to the comedy, at least until the shambling undead arrive.

But that will be next week.

Till then, keep those windows and doors shut.






STOP PRESS

Truth Stranger than Fiction.

EVEN STOPPER PRESS

Reality Stranger than Truth

EDIT: If you'd like the scripts for these scenes, join edmodo and send me a connection request. Sandy has blogged about it here.

The Magnificent Seven

Get hold of a pen and paper. When you play the video below, you'll hear seven words. Try to write them down with the sequence number. With students I usually repeat each one, but you're not getting it that easy, my EFL chum ;)

Compare your list with the one at the end of this post. How did you get on?

But with my class I do the following:

1. Ask them in pairs to compare.  Leave them to discuss it.

2. Draw the class back together. Elicit and produce the correct list on the board. Check meaning, usage, pronunciation, whatever.

3. Tell them they're going to produce a coherent story of a paragraph including all the seven words. They will have three minutes.

4. Put them in pairs, and remind them you want a single cooperative effort per pair, not individual efforts. And please write legibly!

(I usually say three minutes but end up being a bit flexible. But the idea of having to do something fast helps them to focus, I find.)

5. Bring everybody back together and ask each pair to pass their story to the pair on their left. This may be the hardest bit to organise ;) Ask them to read and discuss the story they now have. Whether or not you want to settle for one round of peer-reading or do another one will depend mainly on your class size. Meanwhile, circulate and help if needed.

6. After the reading, it's a good idea to take a some time to clear up questions or errors. How much time? You'll know better than me. It might also be appropriate to choose some stories for the students to read to each other. (It's not something we do much, is it? Getting students to read to each other?)

Dun dun-da-dun, dun da-da-da-dun...

Other minimal septets? See if you can find seven English words with this:

/p~t/  e.g. "pit, pet"

or with

/st~l/ e.g. "steel"

PS It's both gratifying and annoying when you find somebody else has come up with a similar idea to yours. Gratifying because it means you may be on the right track, and annoying because you thought nobody else has good ideas ;) Here you can see Johanna Stirling demonstrating a related exercise, among other things.

My septet from the video was beat, bit, bet, bat, boat, boot, bite. And do submit your story or other minimal septets. The best story wins a plateful of my mother-in-law's excellent barbecue ribs.