Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Listen Up!

Here is how you learned your first language:

listening > speaking > reading > writing > grammar

If you learned English as a second language in school, you probably did the exact opposite. You started with the grammar, you copied meaningless words and phrases, you read textbooks, your speech was unintelligible to a native speaker and it was likely quite difficult for you to understand what anybody was saying.

Your ears are the very first part of your body you should be using to learn to speak English fluently. Remember, your mouth only does half of the work in your first language too. The rest of a conversation is spent listening. Otherwise, how would you know what to say?

And believe it or not, the actual words are of relative unimportance. I’ve mentioned before that only 20% of our communication is what we say. The rest is gestures, facial expressions and tone. For example, I know when a native English speaker is asking me a question ... even if the structure of the sentence is not in the interrogative form, there are no question words and including if the speaker uses only one word ... because their tone goes up at the very end. This change in the sound tells me how to respond.

Sound, that’s the important thing. There are 40 sounds in English, 24 consonant sounds and 16 vowel sounds. Without a doubt, the vowel sounds are the most important and are also the sounds you likely find more challenging. I encourage you to practice them with this three-minute ESL Vowel Sounds Yoga workout video:


As with the other 'homework' I recommend, it's in your best interest to practice with this video every day: perhaps in the morning to start the day off by centering yourself or as a break in the middle of the day, or in the evening to end the day with a nice relaxing exercise. Either way, work it into your daily agenda and you will find that you dominate these 16 essential sounds in no time!

Have a great week!
Jennifer

No comments:

Post a Comment

Your comments are so much appreciated!