It's a wrap or is it a rap?

I was trying to figure out the topic for my last entry for my neverending IT assignement. I was thinking about kindly saying goodbye and see all the IT crew back in the classroom. When I was going to write the title I got confused with the words rap and wrap. I know the both of them are pronounced the same but I was not sure of which one I needed to use in my title. I asked google and it told me it was the latter, to wrap up meaning to finish.

Then I thought of the many times when I got the chance to see the word there instead of their or your instead of you're and finally it's instead of its, all of them used by native speakers.

You can check the most common mistakes in English language here and get a better picture of what I am trying to explain. Finally for me, this ESL assigment is a wrap.

On Procrastination

Breaking habits is sure a difficult matter. Even though I have spent almost 2 decades of my life going to school in different stages, yet I am still not able to get my homework before hand. I remember a friend of mine once told me this not only happens to me, she advised me to relax and procrastinate. By the time I did not know the expression or the meaning of it and she kindly explained to me what it meant. Procrastination means to postpone performing an activity.

 Every night from the past week, I have been staying up late to try to comply with all my assignments at school; whenever I sit in front of the computer monitor, I get this urge to stand up and make some pop corn, when it’s done, I take it with me to my working place and start eating as I surf the net looking for important information. When I am about to finish my popcorn bowl, which usually takes less that 5 minutes, I feel that I must drink something refreshing or I would die from thirst. I rush up to the kitchen and fix myself an iced soy milk frapuccino; I spend my time looking for the perfect spice for it, ummm, cinnamon. Go back to the computer and keep on eating and drinking. By then it looks like I’m ready to start my blog entries, but first I have to check my email account and see who’s online on msn. I could not do my homework without knowing that. I open up a word file and start typing, it seems like I have good ideas going on, and however, these ideas need some music to have more rhythm. Next step, I go back to youtube and begin looking for artists I used to listen to when I was a child. I get mesmerized by the way they dressed, rewind the clips make fun of bad lipsynking abilities and so on. It’s midnight already and I’m so tired. I look at my article and it is half way done, my eyelids are exhausted from all that hard work.

I tell you all of this so you get the picture of me doing the dreaded homework. Trust me , I do understand students because I know well my reality when it comes to doing assignments. Life is so ironic, when you have time to do your homework; there are a thousand other things to do. Watch this cartoon video, procrastination couldn’t have been better expressed. Enjoy.

Using Humor in the ESL Classroom

Today I started going back in my memories about what I thought was funny when I was a child, so I could find the English version and use it to ESL teaching purposes. The first clip that came to my mind was "The Three Stooges", the black and white version. Up to this day, they represent to me the epitome of funny and for that reason I will use this clip for an ESL activity.

Having gone through the video I found lots of expressions that could be used to introduce students to phrasal verbs. Before having students watch the video, choose the phrasal verbs that are featured in the video and make a list. Have the students look for the meaning in advance, make them find out the definitions for: clean up, hold on, pull something out, knock down. Then, make another list for metaphorical expressions such as: spick and span, bet busy, give someone room and take a chance and have them look the words up.

Present the video and discuss the different uses of the vocabulary that was studied in advance. I am going to give this a try, at least I think students are going to laugh their pants off watching the Three Stooges in action and listening to the sound effects.

English Word Stress

As I promised a few posts ago, I come back to the vital subject that is word stress in English. I found this friendly woman on youtube carefully explaining how words are stressed in English and using the US States to show how to put stress on words properly. Besides, there is a chance to practice along stressing the words as the video goes on. I cannot wait to use this with my ESL students.

My First Try at Looking for Better ESL Homework Activities

I truly cannot put into words how much I dread doing homework. I have said this in the past and I haven't changed my mind yet. Nevertheless, I am aware of the positive effects that assigning homework can bring to the table (the ESL table). Now, being back to school as a student and not being able to refuse doing my homework, I've come to terms with the fact that homework is necessary evil. Now it's time for me to explore the options to make it less painful and annoying. 

A long time ago, I took a few subjects related to translation. Those subjects were said to be the most difficult ones throughout the whole Modern Languages Degree, even if the amount of homework was rather heavy, I managed to turn it in on time and I did not feel as much aversion to doing it. The teacher followed a method that I really liked and that I've used until now. Every piece of material that was going to be translated was handed out to us in advanced and the only thing we had to do was documentation. Even though most of the times all f the subjects were new, going to another sources in advance to doing the actual homework gave me everytime this sensation of being relaxed, the barrier of being suddenly introduced to a topic was no longer there. ESL students can always profit from this approach; whenever introducing a new topic, make them do some casual research so they are acquainted with the subject and handle it even if it is in their own native language. This way the fear of speaking for not being able to talk about the subject will be gone.

I have found out throughout these years of teaching, or attempting to teach, that assigning loads of homework or leaving students to work alone on projects is almost useless. I enjoy taking sometime off the usual class to devote to practice in the classroom and do the homework together. That way I make sure students do the work by themselves regardless of the result. I get really angry when students get someone else to do their homework, even if I know that theiy mean well doing so. I tell them to bring as much material they want to about a previously set topic and then we do the homework in the classroom (a brochure, a short essay, etc).

When I was in college, the classes that I enjoyed the most were taught by teacher assistants, they were mostly very young people from French or English speaking countries. They did not have teach us grammar as a formal subject or any other subject. Homework did not exist either and they were some of the most rewarding lessons to me. Practice was mostly focused on speaking and the the center of the debate was always a very controversial topic. From my own experience, I get that homework does not have to be a punishment. We as teachers have the task of looking for current topics that motivate students and at the same time, we must always remind them that the responsibility of learning is on their shoulders.

The Same Old Paradox: Fear of Speaking in a Foreign Language

For the last couple of weeks, I have been going through my memories and I have condensed all the stages I went through college when learning my first foreign language; all of this to see how I can use my own experience to help my future students. When I first started I had some English knowledge and I knew nothing about any other foreign language, the others came after learning English. I made up my mind of going to Foreign Languages School for I innocently thought that learning languages would be less stressful than any other hardcore field related to science or technology. I pictured myself in my hippie fields discovering language through reading and speaking to people from all over the world, all of us smiling and bonding. Now recalling all the process, what all the stages had in common was fear and stress.

It is rather paradoxical that learning a foreign language could cause so much stress on an individual. Language is the result of society and being social, there should not be room for fear if we humans are social by nature. I used to have this teacher who was a native speaker and who was an excellent teacher, nevertheless, we were all so afraid of not understanding was she said and making mistakes in front of her. Now that I think of it, I realized that regardless of her outstanding knowlegde, she was not approachable to any of us. My sister, who took classes with her later, told me she reminded her character of Mrs. Trunchbull from the movie Matilda and having fear greatly interferes in the way a student performs in a foreign language. 

I cannot think of a better example to illustrate my fear of speaking in a foreign language about 6 years ago when I first went overseas. At the time I was 22 and I went to France for my internship. I remember being at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for 6 hours, starving to death and not being able to go buy a baguette for I was so scared of not being understood. Whenever I taught in the past, I have always told my students to be calm and relaxed. We all make mistakes, even in our native language. Any foreign language teacher must be understanding and to me assessing the students' progress must be done from many different angles. Not only what they can produce orally or in writing, learning a language is far more complex than what can be measured throughout production. We must be aware of Krashen's Comprehensible Input Theory, time is needed to store language and build up knowledge before students are able to successfully produce. Now it is my turn to make my ESL room more friendly and understanding now that I have the chance to make a change.

Rhythm and Stress in English

Now that the Phonetics and Phonology Module is approaching, I have spent some time in my mind trying to recall the basic concepts in this area and how their understanding can immensely improve the way we, Spanish speakers, utter sentences in English. When I first took Phonetics at college about 11 years ago, I discovered the nature of Spanish and we were explained the patterns in terms of the time needed to utter each syllable of any word. It turns out that in Spanish when a series of words are pronounced in a single utterance, each syllable will have the same length in terms of the time. That makes Spanish a syllable timed language, where each and every syllable will last about the same, making the rhythm really even. If I take the word Venezuela in Spanish, there are four syllables and the pattern is OOOO.

However, having understood this notion, we part to analyse stress in English, if I take the same word in English Venezuela, the pattern will be ooOo. A long time ago, a teacher of mine advised me, if you really want to sound like a native speaker, get acquainted with English vowels. English is defined as a stress timed language, not all syllables in a determined utterance have the same length when pronouncing them. First, there are two types of word categories in English: content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) the one that carry meaning and linking words (pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjuctions, etc) that are like the cement that glues together all the content bricks. Only content words carry stress in English, generally one syllable in a determined word will have a longer length, the other syllables will be weak and so will be the linking works sorrounding them. 

To exemplify this I will use a sentence. This time around a Stephen King's quote: 

"Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work"

The colored words will not be stressed and the vowels used in them will be weak (they are all pronounced with a shwa /ə/). This means that these words will not affect the total time it takes to produce the sentence. Now, the syllables in bold letters are the ones that carry the stress and will be the strong ones in terms of duration, all the others, as the linking words, will be weak and will be pronounced with weak vowels or usually a shwa /ə/.

I will get back to these concepts later for they are really important to me. I must do some deeper research and freshen up these notions. I know that the important matter when learning a new language is communication and getting meaning accross, however, I am convinced that teachers can take huge advantage of these phenomena and improve the way we utter, breaking our syllable timed language style and using English stress timed rhythm; the students will be thankful in the future. Having said that, I have to keep on reading and practicing.