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TEFL Belton Texas

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This is how our TEFL graduates feel they have gained from their course, and how they plan to put into action what they learned:

said:
Some time ago, talking to a vietnamese friend, I asked something like, “Do you still have to study much about Karl Marx at school?” He looked very puzzled. I repeated. “Karl Marx.” Still a blank look. I said, “ He wrote a book - Das Kapital – it like the Bible for communism.” Pause, then “Ah! Ka M?c! This is just an example of the problems that exist for vietnamese pronouncing english. For us, an “rl” and a sound like “rks” had just disappeared – or was reduced to a very vestigial ‘c” sound. There is no doubt that Asians have problems with english pronunciation different from Europeans. (1). One writer who has addressed this problem (2) claims that certain cultural attitudes play a part. He asserts that vietnamese do not listen very attentively, although he does not quote any data to support this theory. He talks about the fear of losing face, and of standing out. Where this author is rather controversial, is in his assertion that often in esl techniques there is a lot of emphasis on production, whereas he holds the theory that listening is more important. He refers to the way we all learned our mother tongue. We heard expression hundreds of times before reproducing them. So he holds the controversial theory that a much larger percentage of teaching should consist in listening. As is well known, vietnamese is a tonal language. It has six tones. For centuries it was written in Ch? Nôm, which was based on the chinese writing system adapted to vietnamese, and full of chinese words. In the seventeenth century Fr. Alexandre Rhodes, a french missionary and other companions, produced a new way of writing based on the Roman alphabet called Qu?c Ng?. it was not until the twentieth century that the latter became the official language and the official orthography. The relevance of this is that although vietnamese does use this alphabet, most of the sounds are different from english. So both for english-speakers learning vietnamese and vietnamese learning english, this fact is a “false friend.” That is why some people believe that it s best not to see the words at all at the beginning of learning a new language, but to get the sounds first, because when we see a letter we have been pronouncing in a certain way for many years, already there are connections to the organs of speech making “interference” from the mother tongue more likely. There is a method of language learning called the Pimsleur method where the learner is recommended to listen two or three times to 30 half-hour tapes repeating the words, before even look at the writing system. Tran Thi Lan Ph.D. (Hanoi 2009) (3), has outlined some theories and suggestions. Among the most important ideas – and there are others, he recommends that the alphabet be emphasized, and also the Phoneme Chart of the english language. A few other examples of his recommendations are that the teacher should pay extra attention to voiced final “s” and final “ed.” A lot of work is needed to make sure that learners always make a distinction between long and short vowels – because in this case meaning - and therefore comprehension - is affected. Many final consonants present particular difficulties. An example is final K and D sound. For example, the words “work” and “word,” many vietnamese will just say ‘WOR” for both of these words. Final “dge” in words like “edge” are a big difficulty for many too. Clusters of consonants are another problem – again these do not occur in the vietnamese language. So a lot of attention needs to be given to these – for example sts, ts, str, tr. Here, either one or more of the consonants just disappear, or an extra vowel is inserted – for example, “ekisiperiment.” While more work and effort is needed by vietnamese in these areas, many acquire very good english. I think it is good for the teacher to remember that unless we work hard at vietnamese, our communications will be just as badly pronounced or even incomprehensible as theirs sometimes is. Just as they have difficulty hearing many sounds in english, so we have problems with the tones in vietnamese. So just as they are sometimes greeted with a blank look, so when we try to speak vietnamese at first, we often get the same total incomprehension because the word we may be saying does not in fact exist, or is meaningless in that context. The collective wisdom of teachers is first of all to try from the very beginning to get good pronunciation – as bad pronunciation can quickly become ingrained. Secondly, keep patiently but constantly correcting the most serious mispronunciations, because these are the ones which lead to incomprehension. Lastly we cannot be perfectionists here. The vast majority of speakers of a foreign language retain some accent –and that is quite acceptable. But we do want to say Tam Bi?t (goodbye) to Ka M?c! DL 5th September 2012. References: (1) The particular difficulties encounter by vietnamese speakers of english are outlined in en-Wikipedia.prg/wiki/non-native_pronunciation_of_english. (2) Speakingadventure.com . Antonio Graceffo. This man left a Wall Street job to immerse himself in Asian culture including martial arts and language His story is recounted in his book “Wall St Warrior.” (3) www.britishcouncil.org/tran_thi_lan.ppt. Hanoi January 2009.


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