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.