Some practice with phonetics

If you want to practise your own phonetic transcription, there's a series of exercises in my Toolbox which I created for my academic students. You'll find them via this page:

http://www.humsam.hik.se/distans/existstud/toolbox.htm


and then click on the Phonetics link.

There are some downloadable worksheets, a series of sound files, and some answers. One of the exercises has some of Michael Rosen's modern tongue-twisters, like this one:

A car wash washes cars. I wish I was washed like a car wash washes cars.

The Course Meeting 2 pages are nearly ready

We had a crash on our server last week, which made it impossible for me to create new web pages for a couple of days. I have, however, managed to make web pages for just about half of the day's activities from Course Meeting 2. If you visit the home page and click on Course Meeting 2, you'll find a description of all the activities up to lunch time.

Among them are:

• an interactive version of the lesson plan for the Fred in Jail exercise
• a photo version of 'Here are the Lady's Knives and Forks'
• a photo version of 'Here's a church …'

I'll do the rest as soon as I can … but I'm still up to my eyes in it over here.

At least the spring is showing signs of arriving!

Some more Practical English Usage questions

Here are some more for you. As usual, the sections to look in are in my Comment.

1. Why do you say 'ett råd' in Swedish, but 'a piece of advice' in English?

2. What's wrong with this sentence? "She has an own car."

3. Why do native speakers make 'mistakes' like "a song she sung in yesterday's concert" (instead of 'sang')?

4. Why do you describe a building as 'tall', rather than 'high'?

5. If you visited a school in the UK, would it be OK if you said 'shit' if you dropped something on your foot?

Teaching Grammar: Necessary conditions and sufficient conditions

I can see that the discussion about whether to teach grammar or not is alive and well. It's not surprising, really, since this is one of the key issues for any language teacher. At the last video conference, I introduce the idea of grammatical 'metalanguage'. Grammatical metalanguage is the language you use to talk about grammar. It contains words like 'bisats' and 'conjunction', both being words which are hardly ever used outside of school textbooks.

The first issue this raises is: should you be talking about grammar, or should you just be using it? If you use language comprehensibly, you must be using grammar (that's what the 'I am a hotel' exercise is all about). If you can use grammar correctly, is that enough, or must you be able to talk about it too? Lpo 94 is quite clear on this: it wants your pupils to be able to use the grammar, not to be able to talk about it. So … why is there still so much 'talking about grammar' in textbooks?

The banal answer is: because that's what sells textbooks. However, the usual reason is that teachers think that identifying and talking about nouns and verbs is a good didactic device to help pupils learn better (this is why the categories were invented in the first place). In other words, using grammatical metalanguage is a necessary condition for learning a new language.

Let me just divert into what necessary and sufficient conditions are. These are concepts from philosophy, and they work like this: if X is a necessary condition for Y to happen, then Y won't happen unless X happens. If X is a sufficient condition for Y to happen, then all Y needs is X (whereas, if X were a necessary condition, it might not be the *only* necessary condition).

Think of: "you need a key to open that door, if it's locked" If you don't have a key, you can't open the door, so having a key is a necessary condition. However, it isn't a sufficient condition, because you usually have to have the *right* key to open a particular door.

Now, to get back to grammatical metalanguage. Is full competence with grammatical metalanguage (e.g. 'pågående aspekten') a necessary condition for learning a new language? This would only be true if people were unable to learn new languages if they also learned the grammatical metalanguage … and this clearly isn't the case.

Is it a sufficient condition? (Well, no, if it's not even a necessary condition!) However, there are plenty of school textbooks (particularly at the upper levels) which seem to work on this assumption: the only thing the pupils need is to master the grammatical metalanguage.

So, where does that leave you? I'd hope we end up with a realistic assessment of the place of the abstract study of grammar in the practices of a language teacher. My end point is that *teachers* need much more explicit knowledge of grammatical metalanguage than their pupils. There are, very occasionally, structures which lend themselves to an explanation via grammatical metalanguage, but most structures can be learned, practised and used very successfully without the pupils having a conscious knowledge of how they work.

I'm sure this won't be the last word on the subject, though!

Some more Practical English Usage questions

Once again, the sections to look at are in the Comment below.

1. What's the difference between 'big', 'large' and 'great'?

2. What do speakers of US English do on a 'crosswalk'?

3. How many pounds are there in one billion pounds in formal, UK English?

4. There are three common intonation patterns in speech in English. What are they, and what are they used for?

5. Which is correct and why: "the climate gets warmer" or "the climate is getting warmer"?

The Richardson household is a bit of a hospital right now

I've been having a bit of a fraught week - the rest of family came down again with stomach flu (magsjuka) at the beginning of the week. I've been spared, but that's meant that I'm the only person who's been available to nurse all the others!

So … if you've been expecting responses to me to posts or e-mails, I'm afraid I've just been too busy doing other things.

Normal service will be resumed soon, since it looks as if they're all recovering nicely (and, boy, will I get good treatment the next time I'm ill!).

Getting to know Practical English Usage

Practical English Usage is the 'grammar book' on this course … but it's actually a lot more than that. It's a great source of practical information about how English works, and you can use it to help you plan language presentation lessons too.

So … here are five questions, the answers to which you'll find somewhere in Practical English Usage (If you look at the Comment I've written on this post, you'll find which sections to look in).

1. When Americans say 'pitcher', what do British people call it?

2. What's the difference between 'speak' and 'talk'?

3. What do you use a colon for in English?

4. When do you use 'some' and when do you use 'any'?

5. What's the difference between 'small' and 'little'?

What's a 'Team Blog'?

Well … perhaps I should start by telling you what a blog is, just in case you've never come across them before. The term is short for 'web log', which is a way of posting your ideas on the web quickly and easily, and letting other people read them.

This is a 'Team Blog', which means that everyone on the course is also able to make posts of their own, and to comment on other people's posts (with a normal blog, the only person allowed to post is the person whose blog it is).

You can use blogs for lots of purposes - on this course the purpose of the Team Blog is to allow you to post feedback from your Study Group Meetings (and other course events), and to comment on posts from other people on the course (including me, the teacher).

You can create your own blogs and Team Blogs too, now that you're on Blogger (it doesn't cost anything …). My daughter's got a team blog going for her friends in class 8, which they use to share their ideas about books they've read and films they've seen.