dictations online - check it out

https://www.cristinacabal.com/?p=7747 dictations

https://www.thoughtco.com/english-dictations-1211740 https://www.bing.com/search?q=dictation+in+english+for+beginners&FORM=R5FD6&ntref=1

Depende for Spanish / Catalan speakers.

Depende

Read this, check out the link and translate the sentences.

Subject  (aux (not))  verb  + Verb        + on       +  noun /pronoun                                                                           (+ on)   + wh- question element (SVO) (…) the brackets means that the bit in () is optional -fine if you put it, fine if you don't. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/depend

translate these sentences:  

Depende de ti

No dependía de ti

Dependerá de la decisión que tomen

No depende de nosotros.

Depende de cómo lo hagamos.

Dependiendo de la decisión que tomen, haremos x o y.

Depende de donde queráis poner el banner.

Depende de cómo se quiera presentar la información.

Dependiendo de lo que pase, iremos o no.

My students so far today

Today one of my students said, just like many other times before "this doesn't have sense" - How can I get them to memorise the equivalent phrase in English?  "make sense" - this doesn't make sense. Repeat, repeat repeat but what if they just don't bother?

Another student online: when asked how are you?  he says "I am blessed and you"  no punctuation marks, by the way. Apparently he's heard it many times. videos about how to answer the question in what I called "international English" instead of this  "culturally charged" reply, influenced by their country socialising questions, where religion plays a bigger role than in our more secular Europe.
An near-B1 who wants to be C1 in about 6 weeks.

how to study phrasal verbs- draft

We all know studying these infamous phrasal verbs is hard. They are not intuitive. we are misled by the familiar-looking verb and the often also familiar preposition or adverb proceeding it. but the combination, the order and the context etc make it all an ardous task to learn and above all, use, unless there is no other alternative: like with break down for example.

What to look at in order to learn and teach PV more rationally and hopefully more effectively.
subject person or thing
object? separable or not? 
with or without preposition- put this up vs  put me up,   put up with this. and order
meanings, order, and always be very open to other meanings, whether it is is Brit, or Am English and variations.
if what you think you know doesn't fit the context, always check.  --> dictionary skills -->how to find the right translation (words and translations, more than words as meaning)

multiple ways to learn them:
by topic - learn them in that context, in that order you see them
by preposotion /adverb, without a context other than examples and explanation
by verb

off

Today a student said to me
I have two days free next week meaning two days off.
free in Spanish means libre, like not in captivity; it also means  free of charge, without paying.
We use tener un día libre, meaning not to work. so here is the misunderstanding.
Once told that the equivalent expression is take a day off, take a week off, or maybe be off two days, she struggled to understand the idea of off as in not working!
Welcome to English
off is not used just as turn on / turn off
food is off
you are off food
you are off = leave
you are off = you are not working (on a specific day)
time off= free time
take time off= stop working (doing sth for a while)
sth came off = desprenderse
the bomb/ alarm went off = sonó se disparó.
go off to ..= leave for..
head off = leave
etc.
subject person or thing? 
what verb does it go with?
context?
Crazy English!

understanding, fluency, sounds, pronunciation- draft

Some ideas to improve your overall comprehension of oral English, and little by little, your own production:

Learn in a holistic way, the best way I can think of is to:

-          Learn in chunks and train your ear to identify how these chunks sound as a sequence of sounds as opposed of just a group of words

-          Study collocations

-          Be aware of how your brain will work out the little grammar words almost unnoticeable to the untrained ear by familiarising yourself with the sequence of sounds.

-          Become aware of things, identify them and then little by little you’ll produce them yourself (hopefully :-))

-          Learn the pronunciation of each sound but remain flexible, open-minded as different varieties pronounce vowels differently.

-          Be aware that sounds are influenced by what’s next to them, notice the position of your tongue when you pronounce n in thin and think and thing.

-          Identify the different parts of the language learning help you understand language as a whole. ?

-          Learn to identify sounds that you mispronounce, how a native speaker pronounced certain words / phrases and learn to accept that it may difficult for you to actually speak like a native at an adult age. But we can train the ear to identify sounds. It’s not easy but not as hard as it may appear.

-          Listen, transcribe and repeat with supervision at first, repeat on your own, read and repeat. Identify sounds and minimal pairs.

-          Be aware that, just like in Spanish, if you change a sound, you change the word. You change the stress of a word and you may potentially change the word too. Unlike Spanish, you change the stress of a sentence or on a word within a sentence and you give the sentence a different meaning/emphasis.

-          In some cases, just one sound and we have the past or the present of a tense/sentence. Learn to identify it and pronounce it. (-ed is often pronounced as t or d)

-          Identify patterns of letters and their most common pronunciation but never take this for granted. Spelling is so common in English because pronunciation is so unreliable. Homophones, minimal pairs... if you know if the word is a noun, adj, verb, etc , your brain will make a quicker connection to the right meaning, provided you know the word.

-          Learn as much vocabulary as you can. You won’t necessarily understand something if you don’t know the word or expression. You’ll brain may make a connection to something it has stored.

-          Get rid of the idea of one word=one meaning. Words are concepts and can be translated in different ways into different languages depending on their understanding of the world. In how many translations can you think of “meet” into Spanish, and German and French?  And of the word dejar in Spanish into English? For an example of what i mean, go on www.visuwords.com

futurelearn.com has a great course: English Pronunciation in a global World. 

word order and sentence structure

I think word order and sentence structure is one of learner's weakest areas. Years ago I found the anglo link video below and the way she presents the information is simple and very effective in getting learners to understand this. check it out. Absolutely fantastic. 

I often tell my students that they have to tattoo over their foreheads and chest and arms  S Aux Adverb Verb O   SVO as a basic strucutre  - more on that in another post.

we insist on teaching structures and words which we know are key to accurate and even natural-sounding English that adult students will struggle to learn unless they insist, unless we insist. Not because they lack the ability but because culturally and/or linguistically it's just too different from their own mental pattern of their L1. they don't relate to them.
Their brain uses whatever pattern it has and whatever is simpler to retrieve.


ensenyar angles avui en dia a adults que han estudiat anglès tota la vida és desensenyar el que saben o creuen saber - desensenyar mal habits de parla i escriptura.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPyo8-Pr55Q  anglo link - word order 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdCEJX07Oqw Your English Web: Weekly English video lessons

Which one is correct?            

1. a.I usually go        b.  I go usually           c. usually I go 

2. a.   We will never finish this handover before the new Head arrives!   

b. We never will finish this before he arrives   c. We will finish never this before he arrives    

d. Never we will finish this before he arrives

3. a.  I can never remember his name    b. Never I can remember his name     c. I can remember never his name.   d. I can't remember his name never

4. a.  the car  has probably been  in the compound all night     b. probably, the car has been inside the compound all night    c. the car has been in the compound all night. 

5. a. Always Yao gets up at 6 am        b.  Yao always gets up at 6am       c.  Yao gets up always at 6 am       d. Yao gets up at 6 am always.

answers: 1a 2a 3a 4a 5b

reading to improve your fluency

We've all heard that reading is good for vocabulary but what about reading as a way to improve your fluency? Let's look at a few things we can do that can lead to better speaking skills and more fluency in a foreign language - I've studied French as an adult and I have been studying Russian for three years!

1. Read out loud - (en veu alta, en voz alta, en voix haut)

Reading out loud or extensive reading (for pleasure) is another great way to help you with your learning. Reading out loud (en voix haut, en voz alta, вслух) will help you consolidate word order, and sentence structure (where the different elements of the sentence go). You will also learn and consolidate vocabulary. Added value? learning about the author, or the subject or a book, etc! 

Depending on your purpose but it's never a bad idea to choose simple texts of topics which are of your interest and read them out loud. No challenging vocabulary, the aim is to gain fluency (yes, fluency when speaking), no worries about vocabulary, this should be used just as a way to consolidate structures, …it's best done with a teacher or a friend /partner to help you with pronunciation. 

Disadvantage: if done without a teacher (or someone to help) bad pronunciation habits won’t be tackled (ie. No connected speech resulting in dropping final sounds of words, “mis-sstressed” words, etc).

Nowadays, you can also record yourself on-line on www.podomatic.com or https://www.speakpipe.com/ for example, very user-friendly podcast-recording websites. This can be exploited in a number of ways too like the fact that you can keep your recordings on-line and refer back to them whenever you like allowing you to compare it with later recordings of the same text, for example. 

Another "read out loud" thing you can do is to read out loud the exercises you've done in class, once you know the exercises are correct.  

2. Google and other phonetic transcription software
type or paste sentence, or short text on a website with audio /play software and listen and copy. Record yourself reading sentences and see that the more times you say them, the easier it gets to ge your mouth and tongue to produce  initially-strange-sounding syllables and words :-)

3. graded readers

Graded readers (these short, abridged=simplified books) now come with a CD-rom. Great source of vocabulary, great for consolidating structures and tenses, great for, though graded, natural sounding expressions in dialogues…plus the pronunciation support through the Cd-rom.

A means of exploiting the text is by focusing on certain structures. Let’s look at potential areas of development:

1. if you are doing verbs from your grammar book, try and identify them in the text, classify its use (is it present continuous with future reference, or is it a temporary action?, if it is future: will, going to or present continuous, why did the author use “going to” instead of “will”… ) Write your ideas down, on post its and when we have a tutorial class, we can expand on that.
2. Gerunds and infinitives. Want to do, start Ving, like Ving, force me to, … what verbs need to and what verbs need -ing?
3. Prepositions after verbs (and note that if a preposition is followed by a verb, this needs to be in –ing.
4. collocations: words which tend to appear with other certain words. (ejemplo en castellano: matar el hambre o apagar la sed, verdad que nunca decimos apagar el hambre?) This is a collocation.
5. Verb tenses and their corresponding time references: “ago”always goes with past simple, “now” goes with present simple and continuous, “recently” tends to go with present perfect but not present simple, “for” and “since” go with present perfect (in general)…
6. phrasal verbs
7. question formation. How are questions made?
8. Countable and uncountable nouns and some/any, much/many, few/little…
9. comparisons, reported speech, conditionals, passives… (for level 3 –6)
10. etc

Each level focuses on some structures. Levels 1 and 2 are elementary ones, 3 is pre-intermediate, etc. So feel free to use basic level books if you feel unconfident about certain basic structures. Almost all students need to consolidate basic grammar! Please check out each level in:-

http://www.penguinreaders.com/pr/grading.html

Listening to the recordings of graded readers.  Modern ones come with a CD and you can listen and read at the same time. Listen and read each chapter a couple of times (or as many as necessary until you are fully familiar with how words are pronounced (and connected with each other) - make a note of what you think you understand on your first listening, then, listen a second time and make more notes, then listen again with the text (listen and read at the same time). Then, check vocabulary and listen again without the text. Add any variations you like to this suggestion and find what's best for you and your objective. 

Where to find them?

In Spain, you can easily borrow them from Public libraries, and EOIs too. 

You can buy them second hand, or in bookshops and amazon. Just search for Graded Readers Penguin, Macmillan, Oxford, Longman, etc. the big names in EFL  have their own

4. shadowing
Watch this video to find out what this is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnNf_z4LQ7A - a teacher I've just found and it's short and straight to the point. and google for others :-)

culture and hand gestures and face expressions -draft

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210119-why-its-hard-for-people-of-colour-to-be-themselves-at-work 21.1.2021

Teaching culture when teaching a foreign language. 

the metalanguage we use in class: register, polite or formal/informal language, ability, functional language, ...we don't think about the purpose of the communication when we speak in our our native tongues. We just do it. I am a great supporter of explaining the terms together with the grammar and meaning etc when teaching what, say, "ability" means- translate the idea of "saber hacer" in Spanish, to ensure that they understand what ability means, that it's not just a a void, empty term. 

another interesting item when learning a culture is their gestures. French people have face expressions, puffing and rolling of eyes that other cultures don't have. Same with Spaniards and their tones of voice that sound like angry customers all the time to a native English speaker, not to mention the meaning of hand gestures. These, together with Italians' are a fascinating bit of culture to raise awareness off. 

More on that one day..

Polite vs formal/informal English...

Hand gestures  - Culture

http://etqt.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/etiquette-101-gestures-4.jpg

http://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2009/jul/06/learn-spanish-gestures#/?picture=349740605&index=2

http://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2009/jul/07/learn-spanish-gestures

http://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2009/jul/09/learn-spanish-gestures#/?picture=349752000&index=2

James McAvoy Speak Up 311 Actions Speak Louder than Words (pdf in pendrive).

Self-study Despite there being tens of so-called magic methods that promise to teach you English in 6 weeks, or 6 months for that matter, I regret to say that this is just very unrealistic. That’s why we’ve compiled some tips and recommendations to help you make the most of your self-studying, in a realistic way. Provided you are self-driven, motivated and disciplined, you should be reaping the rewards soon. Expect no miracles but reward guaranteed!I am sure you’ve heard and seen all over the notion that in order to master anything, you need around 10,000 hours of doing it, failing at it even!. For some people it’ll be more and for other a bit less, but that seems to be a fairly accurate number, according to experts. That means you’ll get much better results if you  “practice” a few minutes every day than if you do it for three solid hours on the weekend. This would prove that there are no quick methods. However, progress also depends on your goals. When it comes to learning English, let’s first think a couple of things through:
-       Do you want to be accurate and fluent? Accurate meaning: few grammar mistakes and fluent meaning that you aim at making yourself understood despite grammar mistakes
-       Who will you be communicating with? a. native speakers who are not used to speaking to non-native speakers, b. native speakers who usually deal with non-native speakers, or c. non-native speakers of various levels of command of command of the language?
-        How much of my time am I willing to spend time exposed to English, with an active approach to learning out of this exposure? Watching a film in English for the sake of learning English won’t be very productive unless you are active in your learning (I’ll expand on this later)-       How different is your mother tongue from English? What bad habits you have when it comes to communicating in English? – it’s often essential to unlearn what you think you know. Break habits by bombarding the brain with the right expression / grammar structure / whatever you want to learn/... and with repetition you’ll get there!
-       What skills do you want to focus on? Grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, understanding native speakers of different nationalities?
 -       Why do I want to or need to learn English?-       How can I beat procrastination and time-wasting? How can I find a time and a place to learn?
-        Depending on your answers you can choose the material and resources available and set your objectives and be realistic about them.It’s never been easier to learn than now. With opportunities to spend time in countries where the target language is spoken, with mobile learning (apps, the ubiquitous availability of Wi-Fi, photo cameras to take photos of material and sheets and handouts, free online courses, free language exchanges online, online magazines, radios in English online and a host of other options). Therefore, provided you’re motivated and disciplined, learning is at the palm of your hand and just one or two clicks away.The way I interpret language learning is holistic. What does holistic mean? That means that, ideally, when you’re learning a new vocabulary item, a new structure, it’s good to learn it as a whole, as a chunk (two or three  words together) and focus on pronunciation, on connecting the words if they have to be connected, learning the words it usually is combined with. Like this, you’ll find it easier to understand and you’ll understand others far more easily too, you’ll be more efficient and gain fluency, “speed”, so to speak. After all, learning a language is a two-way street, as we say in English (you learn to be understood and to understand). Knowing the grammar will help you be accurate, and connecting these words will make you sound more natural, so easier to be understood and it’s more efficient because your brain doesn’t have to search words one by one. ...English is complex in ways that you may never have been shown or told or imagined. That shouldn’t be a problem or put you off studying it (put you off= quitarte las ganas de) , however, it’s good to be aware of that.  Yet again, this depends on your mother tongue in many ways and how you’ve learned English before.The problem for many is that nowadays most people have learned a bit of English, most can perform at work with varying levels of fluency or accuracy but if you really want to improve and ... that’s hard work, when you can already communicate, ...it’s discipline, it’s a process. Failure to see that you learn a language not only to speak but also to be spoken in, to understand others is crucial, too. It’s a two way thing, as I said above. Don’t just set your goals like : I want to speak better English. Speaking is just one area you want to learn. To speak better English, we need to know what exactly you’ll be speaking about, you need vocabulary, this vocabulary maybe associated to a certain grammar and register, etc.  Learning a foreign language involves speaking and being spoken to, so understanding and being understood. Also, be specific and realistic and put in time in gaining a good command of the basics as this will make it easier for you to pick up a bit more complex grammar. It’s key to understand the have as an auxiliary verb for example, to succeed at higher levels.It’s also a good idea to search online for the main differences between your native language and English. This will shift your focus on how to study. And remember, repeat repeat repeat. Do, write, pronounce, listen to words and sentences etc more than once.  Old school exercises with real life communication, and listening to how words are pronounced and spelled so you can understand them, say them intelligibly and write them properly and associate the sound to a spelling.Also, notice the punctuation. Some learners seem to neglect punctuation altogether. Learn about the false friends in your language, about varieties and accents in English, how “flexible” pronunciation can be, unlike other languages.Some people focus their teaching/learning on specific subjects, “work, neighbours, art, food, etc , as it has often been done in textbooks, the way I see it this method has pros and cons, ..Others use what we call “functional language”, that is, “how to” agree and disagree, to start or close a conversation, suggest, etc. Experiment and find a way that resonates with you, that you identify that you learn the best. There is not perfect way to learn a foreign language.  Repetition is key, go over exercises, videos, podcasts, a few times. You’re learning English, learning is exposure, you learn a word when you’ve seen it a meaningful, relevant context a number of times. Meaningful, relevant to you. You’re brain is lazy, help it learn by exposing yourself to what you want to learn. And yes, there will always be an awful lot that you still don't know. Just come to terms with it.
The only thing I can recommend to make progress is to fully believe in your objective. Use traditional methods, find whatever method and whatever websites/books work for you, be open to unlearning and relearning and accepting weird twists of the English languages compared to your mother tongue. Learning English is a fascinating journey if you give yourself time to understand why it can be hard to master, as an adult.

Is this useful? please feel free to share your experience learning English as an adult
specially if you've tried to learn English when younger, not very successfully. This is the profile of learners I have.