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 :-)