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Progress in a Foreign Language: Facing Your Own Pronunciation

 Progress in a foreign language — especially in speaking — can be greatly supported by recording voice messages and listening to them afterwards with attention and analysis. It sounds simple, but in reality, it is often uncomfortable. Personally, I don’t like recording my own voice and listening to it again. It creates a certain unease. There is something vulnerable about hearing yourself from the outside. The voice sounds different. The mistakes become more obvious. The illusion of fluency can suddenly disappear. And yet — it is extremely useful. If we truly want to become aware of our pronunciation, our rhythm, our intonation, and the mistakes we repeatedly make (especially those that may already be fossilized), then this step is almost necessary. It can be compared to training the body and observing progress in the mirror or in photographs. Without that mirror — without that external reflection — improvement would be very difficult. We would not clearly see where the weaknesses ...
Recent posts

A great way to practice Past Simple (beginners)

I spontaneously came up with a great way to practice Past Simple with a group of beginners.I already had a board game that I used to practice adverbs of frequency. The fields on the board have different verbs in the infinitive form, so students have to say the Past Simple form of the verb they land on. It was fun and very repetitive, which makes for great practice of regular and irregular verbs in Past Simple.     source of board game: isl.collective.com

Activation of Existing Knowledge

Three months ago I started learning French on my own. I bought two books by PONS (see previous post), I watch Youtube videos (I recommend the channel "Learn French with Alexa") and I found a French tandem partner, who I talk to via Zoom. I guess what I mean by self-studying is that I am not planning to take any courses in French. I am simply going to use the above mentioned resources. Yesterday I got an idea about what could be a good way to start studying a foreign language. At the very beginning, why not activate everything that we might already know from a target language and analyze it a bit (with the help of a teacher or an advanced speaker). Being born in Croatia, and therefore coming from a European culture, I already had knowledge of a few phrases and expressions in French. Maybe even more than I was aware. In Croatia I studied art so some expressions I already knew come from this field. Here are some examples of phrases that I already knew: Bonjour, Bon soir, en-face...

Learning a new language on my own with PONS

About two months ago I started to learn French on my own. Already a year ago out of curiosity I listened to the Michel Thomas' audio course for French and found this method interesting but not as efficient as what I am doing right now. Michel Tomas' method requires you to just relax and listen. I found the approach interesting, but more from the point of participating in a kind of a linguistic experiment that isn't very practical. I found the method very slow as well. It's sort of an imitation of how a child would learn its mother tongue, just by absorbing. But two months ago I bought two books for French learning by PONS. The first one is an intensive course with a CD and transcripts ( A1-A2) and the second one is called "Grammar practice through translation method". Its concept is that on one page you have sentences in German that you need to translate into French, and on the opposite page you can find the French translations. The book is organized into diff...

HOW TO BE A GREAT TEACHER (even if you're not one just yet)

I hope that everybody in the TEFL business understands that speaking a language perfectly does not automatically mean that you are a great teacher. By analogy, there are genius self taught musicians, but since they have never learned music theory, they will probably not be able to transfer that knowledge to other people. They are wonderful to listen to, but as teachers they might be absolutely useless. A person who knows ten chords but possesses the right attitude might be more useful to a student than a genius musician. In this post I'd like to talk about the kind of attitude that will get you far in this business even if you're not a perfect teacher just yet. 1. ALWAYS BE POLITE AND RESPECTFUL When a student enters the classroom, say hello, smile and ask them how they are. If this is a problem for you, you're not cut out for this job. This is a basic human interaction which is a prerequisite for this job. Furthermore, do not ask direct questions about your student...

Past Perfect Simple - discovery without freer practice

The main goal of today's lesson was the discovery of the Past Perfect Tense and the controlled and freer practice with it. I started with the pronunciation exercise on p. 71, which was a spontaneous follow-up on an exercise that was set for homework. I decided to board and elicit the differences in pronunciation when "the" comes before a word beginning with a vowel and a word beginning with a consonant. I boarded, elicited pronunciation and wrote phonetic transcription for the following words appearing in the exercise: the Pacific /ðə 'pəsifik/ the Amazon /ði: 'æməzon/ the Andes /ði: 'ændi:z/ I successfully elicited the rules for using /ðə '/ before consonants and /ði: '/ before vowels. Next we moved on to the text that served as the starting point for the grammar discovery. I pre-taught vocabulary by writing a few words, expressions on the board and eliciting the meaning ( set off , second-hand , run out of luck , steam ). Th...

Tourism Vocabulary/Modals of Deduction

The goal of today's lesson was to get the students familiar with a more sophisticated language of travel advertisements. They had to read a short advertisement on p. 69 (New Inside Out intermediate) and do the following exercises as their homework. I often try to set exercises from the student's book as homework because I prefer my students to read at home, especially longer texts. I prefer to assign the reading tasks from the student's book to the ones in the workbook because there isn't a key for them so they really have to make an effort. Also, as my Russian DOS taught me, reading longer texts is not very communicative and should be set as homework. This was a short text but since the language is quite sophisticated I thought it was apt for homework. The text did prove challenging for them. It contains words like: trawling nets, canopy (of trees), coral gardens, select community of travellers . To check the understanding of this vocabulary I created the worksheets wh...