Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Sunday, May 15, 2011

NEW VOICE TECHNOLOGIES AND PRONUNCIATION

Have you think about how your pronunciation or accent will help you or not to use new voice technologies?
Here is a funny example!
Enjoy watching it :)

Saturday, May 7, 2011

"IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO SPEAK WITHOUT AN ACCENT..."

TELL ME HOW YOU SPEAK AND I WILL TELL YOU WHERE ARE YOU FROM

By Ileana Ayala Mendez
Where are you from? Let me hear how you speak!
If we pay attention to the different places where English language is spoken as a first language, we will realize the regional accents of English speakers are very different and vary depending on the different areas where the language is spoken.  And what happen with non-native English speakers? They mainly tend to carry over the intonation from their mother language (tongue) into English speech, so you can tell if the people talking with you come from France, Canada, India, Japan…  But not only this, you can also get more information about people’s background by listening them talking such as: their education level, their social status, their friend’s social status as well, etc. 
 
We, as teachers, have the opportunity and the challenge to expose our students to different English accents in order to improve their language comprehension. They deserve to learn as “real English” as it can gets when they are out from the classroom. We need to help our students to successfully interact in any English native society.
  
What I did while I was teaching 5th and 6th grade was to host invited speakers to the classroom (any English native speaker) and give the students the opportunity to talk with the invited person about different topics of interest. It was a great experience to see the students talk and interact naturally with the invited speaker! After the activity students told they where surprised being able to understand all the conversation and their confidence speaking English was up-grated!
Remember: “It’s impossible to speak without an accent and that there is not such thing as unaccented English”. 

Friday, May 6, 2011

LANGUAGE GARDEN - FUN WAY TO LEARN A LANGUAGE

Here you can check this awesome web site to use for your students to learn and practice language skills with fun.
Colorful dynamic graphic presentation!!! :)

http://www.languagegarden.org/

Thursday, May 5, 2011

PLAY AND LEARN ADDING -ING SUFFIX

Since their first years learning English, ESL students need to adquire the hability to form new words by adding -ing suffix.

Yes, there are some rules we teachers explain at the classroom, but hard practice is needed.

Check this game for younger ESL learners. You may want to use it some day.

Students can practice and get fun at the same time!!!
http://www.firstschoolyears.com/literacy/word/other/prefixes/interactive/-ing.swf

Tablets at the ESL classroom?

One of the ESL teachers I'm following on Twitter, post this interesting article about tablets eventually facilitating more personalized and interactive lerning at schools. What do you think?
 https://edutechdebate.org/tablet-computers-in-education/eventually-tablets-will-facilitate-more-personalized-and-interactive-learning/