Analyzing my pronunciation

First of all, I felt a little insecure about the “th” sound in individual words. It is hard for it to sound totally natural, when I go to the USA I need to be two or three days for the sensation that I´ve chewed ice to disappear, that´s what I feel with the “th” sound in this reading. Then, it was also hard for me to have a natural intonation, since it was a tongue-twister and it is difficult to concentrate in the meaning of the text, so it sounded very mechanical. I think the stress patterns of phrases was appropriate, since I was reading it by lines and kind of a poem rhythm, anyway there are some pauses when I felt my tongue twisted. So, the pronunciation was average, but I did get confused with some words because I felt my mind betrayed me, but the interaction of sounds between endings and beginning of words was understandable, since the independence of words was very marked and linked one with each other.

About strategies, I think exactly this kind of tongue-twister helps to “untwisted” your tongue for English speaking, as well as, practice and practice. As I said before, when I travel to the USA, the first days I feel the sensation felt after chewing ice, and then I get used to the tone, intonation and pronunciation to speak fluent.

Other strategy, can be listening and repetition, the students listen to native speakers and repeat words in pairs giving feedback to each other. Also, another strategy is to analyze dialogues and find difficulties and how to solve the problems. In addition, analyzing pronunciation is a good technique. In fact, the first time I read the text I couldn´t pronounce many of the words, then I searched the pronunciation for a couple of words and began to repeat, the second time I read I felt much more secure.

Giving Instructions Part II

Giving Instructions Part 1

In preschool, it is not easy to accomplish students understanding and performing of what the instructions given by the teacher, since students at this age have low of logical thinking. Anyway, there is the advantage that they don´t block themselves and are most of the time willing to learn interesting and new things.

We should take into account that at this level, one of the most important skill including in the curriculum is listening, so the teacher needs to work a lot to improve the aspects related with it. This means, the teacher has to use a clear and easy to understand vocabulary, visual aids, TPR, gestures, etc. when giving instructions.

For this activity, I choose a language learning activity about family vocabulary including mom, dad, brother, sister, baby, grandma and grandpa in a preschool 1^st grade preschool students, and I focused on the instructions given to accomplish a task practicing vocabulary already learned to reinforce it.

First of all, the objective of the activity was students to practice vocabulary and understand the concept of family, working with some skills as using the scissors, the glue, and placing cutouts in a frame. To begin, I asked students what they see on the page, and they began to say a square, rectangle (it was hard to define what it was for them because there was not much difference on the lines measure), a family, a father, a mother, mom or dad, since some of they use one or the other. Then, was explaining what they were going to do acting looking for images of family members in a magazine, cutting them out, and paste them in the square. I was walking in front of the students to take the scissors from one table, the magazines from other one, to get a student to pay attention by going closing to him. These movements may cause distraction, but I used them as strategy to make sure students are following me. What I noticed is that even when they understood, I could speak a little more melodious, maybe also a little more slowly, and this would help for the two or three students that didn´t get the complete idea. I know that students got the idea and accomplished the activity rightly, three of them needed personal attention, but the reasons vary and they are not exactly about the instructions given.

Explaining ELT-related concepts

The preschool program 2011 is a part of the articulation of basic education, including Preschool, Elementary and Middle school, this is to connect aspects of the learning process. The Preschool program is process centered because it respects all the learning style and the individual characteristics of the student. Also, it is flexible because it enters in any context having an open-ended, social and cultural diversity, and giving the educator the opportunity to adapt it as s/he considers it is appropriate. Some of the purposes are expression confidence, language enrichment, and reading habits as well as writing skills. The curriculum in this program is structure in formative fields, aspects, divided competences specified by learning expectations.

Looking at my Writing

Summary

Writing is not easy, there are many aspects that influence comprehension as structure of the text, punctuation, vocabulary, structure ideas to express them, etc. I think most people want to write as they are thinking, as if they were speaking, so that fact makes it a little hard or confusing for the writer.

Anyway, as teachers, being able to analyze written texts is fundamental since we have to give feedback to students and be able to detect possible mistakes that students are confused about, but also sometimes we write homework instructions, messages to parents and we have the responsibility to have good grammar, good use of vocabulary in order to be clear and to be as an example of good use of L2 for our students.

Some strategies I find useful is writing notes as we read, brain-storming, and an important one that every writer has to do is reading the text when it is finished, before publish it or expose it.

In my partner´s written I found the following errors:

-      Tense errors

-       Some articles are not necessary

-      I think the Mccourse book information has been misunderstood at some point

-      These issues don´t impact with the comprehension of the text that´s why I decided to grade it as good.

Transactional and Interactional English Content

Report

Transactional and interactional English refer to different purposes of speech. In this activity was a little confusing to identify if it was transactional or interaction because we had a conversation different than a normal form than we usually do in our real life, since it was with a studying purpose guided by instructions. My partner and I said that it is difficult to have a conversation like this form, because even when we tried to do it naturally, at some point it looked as artificial speech.

Even when the conversation had characteristics of natural speech, since there are two people interacting, they give immediate feedback, there is a turn-taking interaction, people have shared knowledge and know the context around, they are yielding the turn, and it is suppose to be an interactional speech; it seems artificial for the following characteristics and it becomes transactional (school purpose).

-       Artificial intonation

-       Long Pauses

-       Lack of discourse markers

-       Clear sentence definition

-       Lack of expression

-       Lack of verbal fillers or any item for starting up

-       Lack of fillers of thinking devices, hedges

-       The conversation is kind of rigid.

To work with these characteristics, first, teachers need to know about spoken discourse. So, in order to solve the identified problems we have to know about them. First, we have to know some principals of a conversation as: maxim of quality, quantity, relation, and manner. We can teach our students these aspects, giving them tasks to analyze conversations and identifying problems related with these maxims. Then, we also can teach about social role of conversation and rules related, the students can be asked to make conversations, or to analyze conversations in shows, news, etc., and identify certain characteristics.

I think there is not much more to say, we know that these kind of activities are interactive, dynamic and students with any learning style can participate, so it is a great tool to use in the classroom and fundamental information for teachers to know.