Dear Vu,

I would like to answer you, But I don't know what the "English file" is. Can you explain it to me?

Marylou

Dear Marylou!

"English File" is the name of a book series by Clive Oxenden, Christna Latham-Koenig. It is used to teach English in some language centres in my countries. The updated book is "New English File". They are the products of Oxford University Press.The reference pages at the end of the books are useful for consolidating vocabulary, pronunciation.

Thanks for your replies!

Hi Vu,

thanks for telling me about "English File" . I must try to get hold of the books / series one of these days.

Dear Marylou,

I hope you will find something new and necessary for your career in this series of books.

Hello, everybody,

I would like to share with you how I teach the sounds "m" and "n" to my Chinese students.

First, I have to explain that in the Guangdong province of China people speak Cantonese with many local variations, but the official Chinese language, studied in schools all over China, is Mandarin. These are the two strongest dialects in the Chinese language. When spoken, they sound very differently. When people from the Guangdong province speak Mandarin, they soften the harsher sounds like "zhe"="jewel","shi"= "shick", "che"=chicken, to "ze"=zero, "se"= sick, "ci"=citric respectively. This softening is accordingly transferred into their English.

I still haven't figured out why my students who are from Cantonese origin confuse the sounds of "m" and "n" as well. Considering their age (8-12) I have devised the following exercise:

1. I draw two mouths on the blackboard: one is shut and one is open in a smile, teeth showing.

2. Under each mouth I write "m" and "n" respectively.

3. I say "emmmmmmm" keeping my lips firmly closed. Sometimes that is not enough, so I squeese my lips between my thumb and forefinger until they look squashed. That makes the students laugh a lot, but then, that's the whole idea and it really gets the message across. After we have played around with "m" for a while , we move on to,

4. "n"...I smile widely, showing my teeth (paid a lot of money to have them look nice:):):) and say "ennnnnnnn". You have no idea how many of my students, at that moment, say very passionatly, "emmmmmm". So, I have to tell them that I want to see their teeth while they are saying "ennnnnnn".

5. Then we move on to some very simple, but popular, phrases which , unfortunatelly, 99% of the children have already memorised wrongly because of the way the whole foreign language study system is devised. For example, 99.9% of the Chinese students say, "What's your [nei]? - "My [nei] is John." , or "I [he] a [bram] [he] = I have a brown hat; 99.9% say, "I [an] a student", about 60% say , "I [an] [tem] years old."; about 80% say, "computer [gein]" instead of "computer game" ...and I could go on giving examples for quite a long time.

While going over the phrases, I either point to the appropriate mouth, or write the word under it. Later we play games. 

Game 1: I divide the class in two teams; a student from team 1 must say a word ending in "m" or "n"; a student from team 2 must write it under the appropriate mouth. This game is always hillarious. There is always a lot of arguing and peer correction and laughter.

Game 2: I have two balls - one orange one yellow. I give each ball to a student sitting at the opposite ends of the classroom. When I say, "Go!" the balls are passed from hand to hand. When I say, "Stop!" the students holding the balls stand up and say: for example, the yellow ball asks, "Do Sam and Dan like computer games?", the orange ball answers, "Dan likes computer games, but Sam likes sitting in the sun." I intentionally refrain from making the students use tongue-twisters. It is difficult enough as it is. What I try to do is implement the vocabulary they are studying at a particular moment into familiar, but meaningful, phrases. This way they can reinforce the vocabulary, they can practise pronunciation and they can have some fun for a change:):):)

With my middle school students I have tried tongue twisters like, "Sam likes Dan more then them!"

I think I 'd better stop here. Chinese is so different and beautiful. To me, it sounds like a song. It's amazing how Chinese people can speak for a long time without ever closing their lips, especially, Cantonese. This makes their lips "lazy" and as a concequence foreign language teachers have a really wide range of phonetic challenges to deal with.

best, Iskra (moderator for young learners)

Dear Iskra,

I think your description of pronunciation activity shows the teacher's flexibility in dealing with certain teaching  problems. Your exprerience is also interesting. I must have to say that sometimes the students cannot recognize their wrong pronunciation themselves while speaking and it's the teacher's task to adjust them. In brief, the more varied the students, the more techniques we use to help them overcome their mistakes in learning.