Exercises to generate sentences 1

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Techniques to generate sentences 1

 Student instruction

Take a correct phrase or sentence and modify it, replacing one or more of its elements.

Most commonly heard sentences fall into a limited number of construction patterns. Practicing to generate a great number of sentences according to those patterns, you lay the railroad tracks for transporting your future speech.

Example:

Take a very simple sentence in Spanish. “Quiero” means “I want”. Let us say you found the following sentence in your Spanish book. Therefore, it should be correct.

Quiero un libro.

With a dictionary at hand, or rehearsing the words you have already learned, you generate as many sentences as possible -- at least ten.

Quiero un coche. Quiero un helado. Quiero un refrigerador. Quiero una casa. Quiero una bicicleta. …

The goal is to produce phrases quickly. No need for philosophical profundity. At least, not at this stage. Fill in any words that come to your mind, even if they make no sense.

Then, start transforming and expanding the sentences further. For example, by changing or adding another element.

Mi padre quiere un libro. No quiero ningún libro. Quiero un libro interesante. Quiero comprarme un libro. Quiero comprar un libro en el mercado.

Advice

·        Practice this technique first in your native language. This way you develop a sense of how it works. I guarantee you will become a much quicker and more flexible speaker and negotiator.

·        Take pattern sentences from everywhere: not only from your textbook but also from advertisements, the news, literature, chat rooms, etc.

If you want be notified about the upcoming book or more articles and materials on the psychology and quality management of language teaching, please subscribe to my mailing list.

If you want to read more about quality management in language teaching, please check out the other articles on this blog. If you have not read it yet, I recommend those on student feedback questionnaires and on how to standardize your teaching.

Please out my online courses on language learning.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

About the GO Method

The GO Method applies research in psychology as well as principles of quality management to the language teaching process. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document templates.

Check us out at The GO Method.

About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.

Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.

Techniques for better pronunciation (part 3)

Speed reading

Humans are animals of habit. From a very early age we become recognizable by our idiosyncratic habits: our posture, how we move, breathe, and speak. Most of our behavior is highly habitualized. A risk in language learning is that we may develop a comfort zone for certain aspects of our speech.

We may stick to certain kinds of intonations, may develop the habit of not finishing sentences (a personal ”sin” of mine) when talking. From observing students over the years, a very strong habit is speed in speaking. At a certain point, students choose ”their” preferred speed in a new language. Even as they progress, they tend to continue to speak in that speed “comfort zone” .

How to break out of it? Karaoke speaking with fast role models is a first solution. Use it with talk shows or sports commentators.

Another cure is to practice reading out loud with a stopwatch running.

Needed: a stopwatch (most probably on your smartphone or on a website); a reasonably long paragraph; the table below to track your progress.

Track your ratios over a fixed period of time, say 21 days, using the table below, entering only the first and fourth (or last) indicator for each day. If you enjoy drawing graphs, use Excel or any statistical pages to draw a curve highlighting your progress. If statistics is your passion, run significance tests on your changes.

Advice

·        Do this with all kinds of different texts: fiction books, contracts, newspaper stories, scientific articles, job descriptions, etc.

·        Find websites with tongue-twisters. To leave sufficient time to operate your stopwatch, decide to repeat each tongue-twister a certain amount. Otherwise, it will be hard to measure speed if you say every tongue-twister once, since you need to track milliseconds of differences. The speed of you starting and stopping the stopwatch may become a source of error.

·        Share your results with your accountability partner.

·        Search the web for tips on speed-reading. There are various techniques which include focusing on certain points in each row.

·        Practice in advance words or numbers that are particularly hard to pronounce, for example using a metronome, where each click falls on the main stress of the word.

If you want be notified about the upcoming book or more articles and materials on the psychology and quality management of language teaching, please subscribe to my mailing list.

If you want to read more about quality management in language teaching, please check out the other articles on this blog. If you have not read it yet, I recommend those on student feedback questionnaires and on how to standardize your teaching.

Please out my online courses on language learning.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

About the GO Method

The GO Method applies research in psychology as well as principles of quality management to the language teaching process. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document templates.

Check us out at The GO Method.

About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.

Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.

Techniques for better pronunciation (2)

Karaoke speaking

Student instruction

This technique, while highly effective in learning a target accent, seems difficult for many students to maintain at home as a daily practice. Maybe we feel silly doing it, especially when someone else is around.

It consists of simply speaking along, over or as an immediate echo to a model. This model can be anything: a film, talk show, dialogues from your textbook.

It is like singing along to some music. You quickly develop an ear for being out of tune, and with time you learn how to auto-correct.

I heard that some theater actors practice the same method. For learning and memorizing a new role, they speak to recorded tapes.

·        Do not let yourself be discouraged at the beginning. This is a quite difficult technique. Do not aspire to perfect imitation right from the start. Just start imitating sounds, approximately. Today 1%, tomorrow 1.5%, and so on …

·        Do not try to understand everything the model is saying. The scope of this exercise is more to develop an intuition for language melody and the sounds of your target language.

·        Always look for different material and models, so you do not become fixated with a certain voice.

·        Vary between easy and challenging models.

·        Imagine yourself surfing. At the beginning, you will fall repeatedly, but with time, you will remain for ever longer periods on (or under) the wave.

·        If you lose track, just continue with the next sentence. Do not punish yourself. Just jump on and try again.

·        Many players (and YouTube) allow you to reduce (or increase) speed. If you are learning a language with very complicated sounds, start by reducing speed to 50%, or even more. Alternatively, if you are already good at 100%, why not increase to 150% or more?

Advice for teachers

This is, almost without deviation, my standard warmup technique for lessons at any level. For five minutes straight.

For beginners, I typically use news at reduced speed. You can use a player like VLC to vary reproduction speed. Youtube offers the same functionality. At more advanced levels, I use talk shows, documentaries or audio books. It depends much on your personal style and your students’ tastes.

Learn a language by listening to popular music in that language

Student instruction

Many languages are quite melodic and rhythmic. By applying the Karaoke method mentioned above, while singing the lyrics to popular music, you can build a sense of cadence and understand better the patterns of pronunciation within a given language. Additionally, you can pick up cultural notes about what is important in the country where the songs were written and produced.

I have had a number of students who developed a love for a new language, and then went on to speak in that language very well because they were really fond of the music of a particular country or band.

Advice

·        Be careful to choose popular music from a particular country (for example Fado in Portugal, or Chanson in France) in order to avoid learning and repeating words that might be offensive within that culture. Popular music is usually free of obscenities.

·        If you don't understand the lyrics of a song, take some time on a number of free sites to look up the translations. This might be another perfect opportunity to look up the translation in a third language (French translations of Portuguese songs) so that you can study both at the same time.

If you want be notified about the upcoming book or more articles and materials on the psychology and quality management of language teaching, please subscribe to my mailing list.

If you want to read more about quality management in language teaching, please check out the other articles on this blog. If you have not read it yet, I recommend those on student feedback questionnaires and on how to standardize your teaching.

Please out my online courses on language learning.

Stay tuned!

Gerhard

About the GO Method

The GO Method applies research in psychology as well as principles of quality management to the language teaching process. It conforms to key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document templates.

Check us out at The GO Method.

About me

Psychologist and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. Coordinator of the GO Method network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.

Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.