Thứ Bảy, 9 tháng 8, 2014

Pronouncing "th"

WWW.ẨMTHỰCSẠCH.COM 20:03

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER -- help for English learners who have trouble pronouncing words with the letters t-h.

  Listening online or download

RS: Our friend Lida Baker joins us with a pronunciation lesson. She writes textbooks for English learners, and teaches at the American Language Center at the University of California at Los Angeles.
AA: Lida Baker says the problem is that few other languages have the sound -- actually, the two sounds -- that we write in English with the letters t-h.
BAKER: "There's t-h like in the word 'thing' and then there's the t-h sound that you have in a word like 'brother.' And because it doesn't exist in a person's language, what they tend to do is to substitute a sound that they do have in their language.
"So a word like 'thing,' a French speaker might pronounce it as 'sing.' They'll put an 's' there because they don't have a t-h sound in their language, so they may not be aware that the t-h exists. And even if they do, they don't know what to do with their mouth in order to produce that sound, so they simply substitute something that they're familiar with.
"Other people might pronounce it as 'ting.' And in the same manner, the word 'brother,' speakers of some languages pronounce it as 'bruzzer,' with a 'z' sound, and other people pronounce it 'brudder,' with a 'd' there in the middle."
RS: Now let's get back to the two different t-h sounds. With the example of "brother," the vocal cords vibrate ... brother. When the example of "thing," there's no vibration ... thing.
AA: Our lesson continues, as Lida Baker describes the basic way to form a t-h sound.
BAKER: "It involves putting the tongue between the teeth and then inhaling and blowing air out. And of course you have to do all these things at the same time, so it takes a little bit of practice."
AA: "I'm trying to do it myself and I can't do it!"
BAKER: "Well, step one, Avi, put your tongue between your teeth, take a deep breath and now blow."
AA: [Blowing sound]
BAKER: "And say 'thing.'"
AA: "Thing."
BAKER: "Yes. And t-h is easy because you can actually see that the tip of the tongue protrudes between the teeth."
AA: And once her students can see for themselves -- it helps that she walks around with a mirror -- she then moves on to teaching "sound discrimination."
BAKER: "I might write the word 'sing' -- s-i-n-g -- and the word 'thing' -- t-h-i-n-g -- on the board, and under the word 'sing' I'll write the number one, and under the word 'thing' I'll write the number two. And then I'll start saying those words, and the students have to -- if they hear me say 'sing' they have to hold up one finger and if they hear may say 'thing' they have to hold up two fingers.
"So modeling the sound, learning how to put one's mouth in the proper position, doing sound discrimination exercises, to make sure you can hear the difference between two sounds, and finally practicing the sound in context, in meaningful ways, such as a game or a dialogue or a discussion -- those are the four parts of a pronunciation lesson."
RS: "And telling the students ... or I should say, and encouraging the students that this is a very difficult task, and that with practice -- hopefully -- they can approximate sounding like an American."
BAKER: "With time."
RS: "With time."
BAKER: "Because don't forget that when people are learning a language, what's their number one priority?" RS: "Communication."
BAKER: "Exactly, communication. So they're concerned with vocabulary, they're concerned with choosing the right word. Pronunciation tends to be almost the last priority."
AA: "Which, ironically, is what native speakers might end up judging them on, is whether they can understand how they're pronouncing words." BAKER: "Well, it's very ironic, because pronunciation is the very first thing that people notice about you."
RS: So what to do? Lida Baker tells her students at the American Language Center in Los Angeles to look in a mirror and -- you guessed it -- practice, practice, practice.
AA: Need help practicing your American English? Write us at VOA Wordmaster, Washington DC 20237 USA. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com.
RS: And our new Web site address is www.voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble. 

(Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)


Exceptional Verbs

WWW.ẨMTHỰCSẠCH.COM 05:21

AA: I'm Avi Arditti, Rosanne Skirble is away. With me this week on Wordmaster is our English teacher friend Lida Baker in Los Angeles, to talk about a few verbs that can cause trouble for even the best-trained non-native speakers.  


Listnening online or download MP3

BAKER: "I got the idea for this segment because for the past six weeks I've been working with a group of brand-new English teachers from Hong Kong. Their English is superb, but I noticed here and there that there were still little errors that persisted, and one of those errors was with the word 'let.' One of the students got up to do a presentation and she made a sentence something like, 'and at this point I would let the students to talk among themselves.' To my native ear, of course, that 'to' shouldn't be there.
"And, you know, there's a very logical explanation for why a student would make a mistake like this. Let's take a sentence like 'letting the students to sit down' and think about what it really means. Well, it means that the teacher allowed -- or will allow -- the students to sit down. With a verb like 'allow,' it's necessary for us to include the preposition 'to,' but with 'let' it isn't."
AA: "So it would be like, 'Allow me to introduce myself. Let me sit down.'"
BAKER: "Exactly. Or 'let me introduce myself.' So what students do is they generalize from one form to another and therefore make the mistake. There's a few other verbs that act like 'let.' Think of this sentence: 'My mother made me clean my room.' It wouldn't be correct to say 'my mother made me to clean my room.' But it's perfectly correct to say 'my mother forced me to clean my room,' right?"
AA: "Right, exactly."
BAKER: "So with the verb 'make,' it isn't correct to use the preposition 'to.' Another example is a structure like this: 'I had the waiter bring me some water.' We use this structure -- I-had-someone-do-something-for-me -- in the sense of somebody that we hire in some cases to do a service for us. So 'I had the plumber fix the leak in my sink' or 'I had the dry cleaner remove the stain from my silk suit.'
"I think the best way to approach this from the learner's point of view is to think of verbs like 'let' and 'make' and 'have' as exceptions, because the normal pattern would be to include the preposition 'to.' So once the student is aware of the fact that these verbs don't act like others, then the student can start kind of paying attention and looking for them when they listen to the news, when they listen to the radio, when they watch television.
"Another really good way to learn these verbs is to look for them in song lyrics. Think of all the songs that have 'let' in them: 'Let Me Go,' 'You Made Me Love You.'" (laughter)
MUSIC: "You Made Me Love You"/Judy Garland
BAKER: "So I would tell my students to go to the Internet, because on the Internet you can find song lyrics, there are thousands of song lyrics on the Internet, and look for your favorite songs and read the lyrics. You're going to find lots of examples of sentences with 'let' and 'make' and 'have.' And if you start humming those songs in your head, it's really going to help the student to remember how to use these verbs correctly. Can you think of any others?"
AA: "Uh ... "
BAKER: "'You Make Me Feel Like Dancing,' 'You Make Me Want to Sing,' 'You Make Me Want to Shout.'" (laughter)
MUSIC: "You Make Me Want to Shout"/Otis Day & the Knights
AA: Lida Baker teaches in the American Language Center, part of the University of California at Los Angeles Extension program. She also writes textbooks for English learners, available through the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.
And while Lida cannot answer questions personally, send them to us at VOA Wordmaster, Washington DC 20237 USA. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com, and our Web site is voanews.com/wordmaster.
I'm Avi Arditti.
MUSIC: "Shout" 
(Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)

 

 


Thứ Năm, 7 tháng 8, 2014

Using A Dictionary

WWW.ẨMTHỰCSẠCH.COM 20:09

A: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble and, now that the Olympics are over, we're back with WORDMASTER. This week -- going for gold in using the dictionary!


 Listening online or download

RS: We looked up our friend Lida Baker. She teaches in the American Language Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, and writes textbooks for English learners.
AA: Lida Baker says a dictionary is "the most important tool that an English learner has." But, she says students often are not aware of the wealth of information in a dictionary.
RS: A good dictionary, that is -- one that lists not just all the definitions of a word, but also how to use that word correctly. For instance, a good dictionary warns you if a word is considered vulgar or otherwise offensive.
AA: Lida Baker says a good dictionary also helps you sort out the different meanings a word might have in different English-speaking countries.
TAPE: CUT ONE -- LIDA BAKER
"So if you look up, for instance, the word 'lift,' the first definition in my American English dictionary is, ‘if you give someone a lift, you take them somewhere in your car, and a synonym is a ride.’ So that is the most common meaning in American English, but if you read down a ways in this definition you will see a label that says 'British' and next to it you will see the words 'an elevator.'"
RS: That's right, an "elevator" in American English is a "lift" in British English.
AA: Lida Baker says another thing a good dictionary can tell you is how a word is generally used.
TAPE: CUT TWO -- BAKER/AA/RS
BAKER: "You'll see things ike 'formal,' 'informal,' 'humorous,' 'literary' or 'slang.' And a good example of this is the word 'chill.'"
RS: "C-h-i-l-l."
BAKER: "Right. When it's used as a verb it means to cool something down and it doesn't have any particular label, but definition number two has the label 'spoken and informal.' And the definition here is to relax instead of feeling angry or nervous. And there's an example sentence: "Shelley, just chill out, OK?"
AA: "That sounds like slang, to 'chill out.'"
RS: "Which is informal."
BAKER: "Spoken or informal, right. So the student looking at this definition would know that they shouldn't use this if they're writing a composition in a college course, or you probably shouldn't use this if you're talking to the president of your company during a job interview or something like that, a more formal situation."
AA: OK, now let's look up the word "frustration." Ah yes, here's the definition I'm looking for: "noun -- the feeling you get when you try to look up the correct spelling of a word that you have no clue how to spell."
TAPE: CUT THREE -- BAKER/AA
"I do not know a magical solution to this problem. Students from Asia tend to be exceptionally fine spellers in English even if they don't know what a word means. Students who come from other regions of the world have much more difficulty with spelling and they really get stuck in a situation like this if they don't know how to spell a word. Now there is something called a backward or reverse dictionary. Instead of finding the word with its correct spelling, you can look up a word based on the way it sounds, but I haven't actually seen one of these."
RS: So how do you choose the right dictionary? Well, Lida Baker says it all depends on what you're looking for.
TAPE: CUT FOUR -- BAKER
"If I'm reading a story for my own pleasure and I encounter a word and all I want is a quick and general sense of what the word means so that I can then continue with my pleasure reading, in a situation like that I might use a bilingual dictionary. I'll look it up, I'll find a one-word translation into my own language and then I'll keep on reading. But if my purpose is to learn English with the purpose of being able to use a word in an actual conversation or in writing a college composition or a business report, in a situation like that I would want to use an English-English dictionary that gives all the usage labels, the complete grammatical information, the example sentences and so on."
AA: Lida Baker comes to us from Los Angeles, where -- when she's not thumbing through dictionaries -- she writes textbooks for English learners and teaches at the American Language Center, part of the University of California Extension program.
RS: If you have a question, send it to us at VOA Wordmaster, Washington DC 20237 USA. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.
MUSIC: "Your Dictionary"/XTC 

Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)





Thứ Tư, 6 tháng 8, 2014

Modals

WWW.ẨMTHỰCSẠCH.COM 20:25

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster, meet the modals!

RS: Modals are words like can, could, will, would, may, might, and must. The list goes on. And they can be tricky to learn.
AA: We get more of an introduction from English teacher Lida Baker in Los Angeles. 



BAKER: The modals have descended from verbs but they don't have the same characteristics. For example, modals never take an 's' ending. So a verb, for example, you say 'I go,' 'you go,' 'he goes.' But with modals it would be 'I would,' 'you would,' 'he would.' There's no difference."
RS: "Why are they so difficult to learn?"
BAKER: "One of the reasons is that almost every modal can be used in more than one way. As an example, the modal 'can' can have the meaning of ability, like 'I can swim.' But it can also have kind of a predictive meaning, where you can something like 'it can rain later today.'"
AA: "Now what about the word 'must.' Talk a little bit about 'must.'"
BAKER: "'Must' is a very interesting word. We don't use 'must' a whole lot in the U-S. It's used a lot more in Britain. But we do use the quasi-modal 'have to' a lot in the United States, and we pronounce it as 'hafta,' as if it were one word. 'Must' and 'have to' have the same meaning. They have this meaning of obligation, like 'I can't go to the movies with you tonight because I have to do my homework.' Now something that's interesting about the words 'must' and 'have to' is, what's the opposite? Is it 'must not'?"
AA: "Sure, 'you must not go."
BAKER: "Aha -- wrong!"
AA: "Oh."
BAKER: "In fact, the opposite of 'must' isn't 'must not.' The opposite of must is 'don't have to,' because what we're talking about here is the sense of obligation. 'Must' and 'have to' mean you have to do something because you're obliged. What we're looking for is something that has the meaning of no obligation, and the way we do that in English is to say 'don't have to.' 'You don't have to do you homework now, you can do it later.' And by the way 'mustn’t is almost never said in U-S English."
AA: "It's British."
BAKER: "It's very British."
AA: "Now here's an example, you walk into a room, you want to sit down, you want to ask the other person for permission, just to be courteous. What should you say?" Do you say 'may I' -- "
BAKER: "'May I sit down.'"
AA: "'May I sit down.'"
RS: "Or 'can I sit down.'"
BAKER: "Now, depending on the circumstances, you see. Because another function of modals is to express degrees of formality. So if you're in a bar, and it's noisy and it's very casual, you might say 'can I sit here.' You'll use 'can.' If you want to make it a little bit more formal, a little more polite, 'could I please sit here?' If you're in an elegant restaurant or something like that, or if you're speaking to someone who clearly is -- I don't want to say above you in status, that's a very un-American way of thinking."
AA: "Someone in authority."
BAKER" But someone who has more authority than you or is older than you, you might use 'may' because it's more formal, it's more polite, 'may I please sit here?'" So we use modals to express degrees of formality."
RS: "So simply by listening and perhaps jotting down what you hear, or questioning when someone says something you don't understand that has a modal in it, and keeping a list of those in the context, might help you."
BAKER: "That's one technique. Another technique is an eavesdropping technique where when you hear people talking, you kind of in your mind repeat what they've just said. So if you hear someone in a restaurant say 'could I please have some more coffee,' you sort of repeat that to yourself, 'could I please have some more coffee, could I please have some more coffee."
AA: Lida Baker teaches at the American Language Center at the University of California at Los Angeles. She also writes textbooks for English learners, available through the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.
RS: However, Lida Baker cannot reply to messages personally. So send your questions to VOA Wordmaster, Washington DC 20237 USA, or word@voanews.com. And, you can find our programs on the Web at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.
MUSIC: "Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better"/Ethel Merman and Bruce Yarnell [Song from the play "Annie Get Your Gun"] 

Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)


Making A Request

WWW.ẨMTHỰCSẠCH.COM 07:07

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster -- how to make a request, as in, "Could you help us out?".

RS: That's what we asked our friend Lida Baker. She teaches in the American Language Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, and she writes textbooks for English learners.


Listening online or download MP3

AA: We'll start with the simplest form of request, the imperative form: "Close the door." "Sit down." "Read this." Beware, though: Unless you're saying this in a friendly way to someone you feel comfortable with, you could offend people. That's because it sounds more like an order than a request.
BAKER: "Most Americans, I think, would agree that the imperative form is a little bit too direct."
RS: "It doesn't give you a sense of security or politeness."
BAKER: "Right. So what we do is that we can take that imperative form and we can add words and phrases that we call softeners. So 'close the door doesn't sound very polite, but as soon as we say 'please close the door' it becomes a lot more acceptable."
RS: Now if that's not polite enough, Lida Baker says, you can take it a step further.
BAKER: "Would you mind closing the door' or 'would you mind telling me where the cafeteria is?' So we also use the form 'would you mind' followed by the -ing form if we're trying to be very polite.
"Now an interesting thing about requests is if we think that we're asking for something that's an imposition on the other person, or if the other person has a lot more authority than we have, then we might tend to make the request longer and we would add these softeners at the beginning that are kind of a combination of the things that we have already talked about.
"So we start with 'close the door.' We add 'please close the door,' and to make it softer, we could say, 'Could you please close the door,' and to make it even softer, we could say, 'Could I ask you to please close the door?'"
AA: Lida Baker says you'll never offend anybody if you begin a request with a phrase like "could you" or "would you," as in, "Would you mind closing the door?"
BAKER: "By the way there's something interesting about the form 'would you mind closing the door.' How do you answer that?"
AA: "Yes, I mind. (laughter)"
RS: "You don't answer that. You just say yes."
AA: "It's rhetorical."
BAKER: "OK, if I say to you, 'would you mind lending me your English book?'"
RS: "I might say 'no problem.'"
BAKER: "That's right. You don't say 'yes' or ‘no.’ You say 'no problem' or you say 'sure.' But what does it mean if you say 'no'?"
RS: "No, I wouldn't mind lending you (the) book' -- which means yes! (laughter)"
BAKER: "That's right. It's funny with this expression 'would you mind,' that 'no' means 'yes.' 'No, I wouldn't mind' means 'yes, I'm going to lend you my book.'"
RS: "You know, the problem here is the question is not a yes or a no question, so you can't answer it with a yes or a no."
BAKER: "That's exactly right. If they agree to do what you want, they'll say 'sure' or no problem and if they're not able to do the thing that you're asking them to do, they'll say something like 'sorry' and then they'll give you an excuse. So if you say 'would you mind lending me your English book tonight,' they'll say, sorry, I can't. I need it.'
"Here's another one that we haven't mentioned before, if you REALLY want to be polite, you could say to somebody: 'I hope I'm not imposing, but could you please lend me your English book."
AA: "But you would reserve that for a situation where you're really asking for an imposition."
BAKER: "You suspect that what you're asking for is asking the person to go out of their way for you."
AA: Lida Baker -- whose books are available through the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company -- cannot reply to messages personally. But she does go out of her way to answer questions on the air, so keep sending them in!
RS: Our postal address is VOA Wordmaster, Washington DC 20237 USA. E-mail is word@voanews.com. And our Web site is voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.
MUSIC: "Could You Use Me" [from George and Ira Gershwin's Great Depression-era Broadway show "Girl Crazy"]

(Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)
 

 


Thứ Ba, 5 tháng 8, 2014

Key to a Better Accent in English

WWW.ẨMTHỰCSẠCH.COM 06:31

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: more advice from English teacher Lida Baker. 

Lida was with us last week to answer a question from an online English teacher in Manila. It had to do with accent reduction. But it got us to wonder what students who have no understanding of the English sound system can do on their own to improve their pronunciation. 
Listening online or download mp3

LIDA BAKER: "There are a couple of things you can do, and how successful you are depends to some extent on how good your ear is. But one thing that is really, really helpful is singing. It's very interesting, I noticed in recent years that the younger students in my classes who've grown up listening to American pop music and rap music and watching a lot of MTV, they come into class -- now, they still have the same problems with grammar and vocabulary that students have always had. But these students are coming in with a really good accent in English. And they tell me that it's as a result of the fact that they've grown up listening to American music. So, yeah, spend time listening to American music."
RS: "Or watching TV or listening to a radio broadcast."
LIDA BAKER: "I mean, I think watching and listening are helpful, but because they're not active, you're not moving your mouth. You know, it's passive."
RS: "Well, what if you would, for example, record a passage and then listen to it, understand where the intonation is and where the accents are and how the words are produced and then -- "
LIDA BAKER: "Well, sure."
RS: "Try to reproduce it yourself, sounding, mimicking, repeating."
LIDA BAKER: "Absolutely, you can do that. Take any segment of English and record it and then use your stop and start button on your recording device to listen and repeat. But there, just a caveat: sometimes it's very hard to know what you're listening to. If you don't know that there is such a thing as stress and intonation and linking, you might not necessarily hear those features. So I do strongly recommend that people get a pronunciation book.
"Get a book written for students of English as a second language which explains, in language that you understand, how the sound system of English operates. And just one piece of advice when selecting a book -- actually, two pieces of advice. Make sure it comes with tapes or CDs. And make sure it doesn't deal only with sounds; make sure that it also targets stress, intonation, linking, clustering and the features of language aside from sounds.
"Sometimes pronunciation books come in series, so you'll have level one, level two, level three, and the level one book very often deals only with phonemes. And I think that's a mistake. Books may do that just because, with beginning students, it IS easier to fix problems with phonemes than it is to deal with stress and intonation and all that.
"But it really is a mistake to think that my accent is caused by the fact that I'm not able to pronounce the 'th' sound or, if I'm learning French, I can't pronounce the French 'r' and that's why I have an accent. There's so much more to it than that."
AA: "Our listener in Manila also has another question. He wants to know if it's OK to correct students right after they commit an error. What do you think about that?"
LIDA BAKER: "If it's an error with a grammatical feature or a vocabulary item that the class has already studied, so the student knows the rule, go ahead and correct it on the spot, because at that point what you're trying to do is to retrain the student to use the right word or to use the right grammar, and if they already know the rules, then that can be very helpful.
"But if it's an error that the student has never made before, it's going to take some time to explain the mistake, and if the student is in the middle of communicating something that's really important to her, then you probably don't want to interrupt them and make that correction on the spot. You probably want to let them finish saying what they're trying to communicate, and then afterwards make that correction. That would be how I would deal with that."
AA: English teacher and author Lida Baker in Los Angeles. If you missed our segment with her last week, you can find it at voanews.com/wordmaster. And that's WORDMASTER for this week. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.
 
(Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)
 



Chủ Nhật, 3 tháng 8, 2014

Gerunds and Infinitives- Part 2

WWW.ẨMTHỰCSẠCH.COM 17:48

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: more of our discussion of gerunds and infinitives with English teacher Lida Baker. 


Listening online or Download mp3
RS: A gerund, remember, is a verb ending in -ing but used as a noun. An infinitive is a verb with the preposition "to" as in to go, to swim, to walk.
AA: Huy Doan in Vietnam asks about the verb "regret." He wants to know if the verb that follows it should be a gerund or an infinitive, and what's the difference? We asked Lida.

LIDA BAKER: "If we have a sentence like 'I regret to inform you that you have not been accepted to the university of your choice,' that's a correct sentence. In contrast to that, if we say something like 'I regret buying that car,' that's also a correct sentence. So what's the difference? OK, with this verb, and with a few other verbs, the choice of infinitive or gerund has to do with which event happened first. If I say 'I regret buying that car,' what happened first?"
AA: "You bought the car."
LIDA BAKER: "I bought the car. And later I regretted it. Now let me give you a clearer example of that: 'I stopped smoking' versus 'I stopped to smoke.'"
RS: "Alright ... "
AA: "Ohhh."
RS: "Right, 'I stopped smoking' means 'I don't smoke anymore' and 'I stopped to smoke' means I stopped ... "
AA: "To go smoke a cigarette out on the street."
RS: "It's very tricky."
LIDA BAKER: "That's very tricky and very, very -- a pitfall for students. Let's see if we can form some kind of a generalization from this, OK? Basically some verbs must have a gerund after them. Some verbs must have an infinitive after them. And some verbs can have both.
"Of the verbs that can have both a gerund and an infinitive after them, sometimes there is no difference in meaning. But sometimes there is a big difference in meaning, as we just saw in the example of 'I stopped smoking/I stopped to smoke.' So those are the four classes of uses of infinitives and gerunds in object position, alright?"
AA: "How do you learn them?"
LIDA BAKER: "The learner first of all has to know that there is such a thing as a gerund, there is such a thing as an infinitive, that they can occur in subject position, that they can occur following the verb in a variety of positions. So the learner first of all needs consciousness-raising. You know, what are the options?"
RS: "So should a student, once he has that overview, get out a list of words and start memorizing?"
LIDA BAKER: "No, that is not the best way to learn infinitives and gerunds -- although, interestingly, when I started teaching many, many, many years ago, typically what textbooks would have would be a list of verbs in alphabetical order. You know, you'd have a list of verbs that are followed by gerunds and a list of verbs that are followed by infinitives. The student would have no choice but just to memorize them.
"Since then, what linguists have learned, or have figured out, is that infinitives and gerunds very often fall into meaning categories. For example, there are a whole bunch of verbs that are generally used with the meaning of communicating something that are all followed by gerunds. I'll give you a couple of examples. To recommend: 'My best friend recommended seeing a doctor.' Or the verb suggest: 'He suggested leaving early in order to avoid the traffic.'
"So, many textbooks nowadays present the verbs which are followed by gerunds versus the verbs that are followed by infinitives in terms of meaning categories, OK? Then there is a category of verbs of choice or intention, that have that meaning, so verbs like choose or decide or refuse. They're followed directly by the infinitive. So: 'He decided to go,' 'He expected to receive a letter from his mother.' The point is that infinitives and gerunds can be learned alphabetically, like you mentioned, but they can also be learned in categories."
AA: Lida Baker writes textbooks for English learners and teaches at the American Language Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. We have the first part of this topic,  and all of her previous segments, on our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster.
RS: And our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble. 


(Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)


Gerunds and Infinitives- Part 1

WWW.ẨMTHỰCSẠCH.COM 06:22
 
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: to be or not to be, or should there be an -ing? That is the question as we look at gerunds and infinitives.


 RS: To be, to run, to eat: the "to" indicates the infinitive form of the verb. But if you were to use these verbs as gerunds, they would take an –ing as in being, running and eating.
AA: Juan, a listener in Chile, is not always sure when to use an infinitive and when to use a gerund. He sent us four sentences and asks if they're right:
RS: Here they are: To swim is a good exercise. To work ten years in the mine is enough. Sleeping is a luxury. Being able to read is important.
AA: A good question for English teacher Lida Baker in Los Angeles:
LIDA BAKER: "The very simple answer to Juan's question is: yes, that the gerund and infinitive are more or less interchangeable when they are in subject position. Which is the way the sentences that he offered as examples -- notice that the gerund and infinitive are at the beginning of the sentence, they are the subject. And I think we should probably, for those who might not remember, just point out that a gerund is the -ing form of a verb but used as a noun. So, 'swimming is good exercise.'"
AA: "But the way he says here, 'to swim is a good exercise,' now to my ear it didn't sound like native English to say, 'To swim is a good exercise.' I probably would have said 'swimming is a good exercise,' 'working ten years in the mine is enough.' Not 'to work ten years,' 'to swim is a good exercise.'"
RS: "It's a little bit more formal to use the 'to' plus the verb, the infinitive."
AA: "Yeah."
LIDA BAKER: "But what about the sentence, 'To be able to read is important'? To my ear, that's absolutely correct."
AA: "I agree with you."
LIDA BAKER: "When we talk about infinitives and gerunds in subject position, at the beginning of a sentence, a person who's learning English probably needs to know that the meaning is more or less the same."
RS: "What's the difference in other positions between the gerund or the infinitive."
LIDA BAKER: "Gerunds or infinitives can occur in all the positions that nouns normally occur. So we've already seen Juan's example in the subject position. They can also occur after the 'be' verb. So you have a sentence like, 'Her dream is to become an opera singer.' Or, 'My hobby is playing the piano.' They can occur in what's called an appositive. An appositive is a noun that comes after another noun where the second nouns explains the first noun. So in a sentence like 'I appreciate your offer to take me to the airport,' we have the noun 'offer.' And what is the offer?"
RS: "To take me to the airport."
LIDA BAKER: "Right, so there are two noun structures there, one of which defines the other one. So that's a way that we use infinitives and gerunds. The appositive structure, we always use an infinitive. So, 'I appreciate your offer to take me to the airport.' We would never say, 'I appreciate your offer taking me to the airport.' Right?"
AA: "Right."
LIDA BAKER: "That's absolutely wrong."
AA: "Well, you said -- wait a second, you said an appositive is a noun that follows another noun."
LIDA BAKER: "Uh-huh."
AA: "So 'to take' in that case, even though it's an infinitive form of a verb, it's being used as a noun?"
LIDA BAKER: "Yeah, infinitives and gerunds are almost always used as nouns. That's part of the definition."
AA: "OK, I knew that as a gerund, but I didn't realize that was true with an infinitive."
LIDA BAKER: "Not in every case, but in almost every case. Do you want to hear a couple of other?"
AA: "Please!"
LIDA BAKER: "Object of the preposition, and these are always gerunds. So, 'Thanks for helping me.' The preposition 'for,' and the word 'helping' is the object of the preposition. In that case, we always use a gerund.
"And finally, the one I want to mention is the infinitive or gerund used as a direct object. That is to say, the object of a verb. And the reason I mention this last is that this is the one that is the biggest challenge for people who are learning English. So are you ready?"
RS: Not quite. We're short on time, so we'll finish the discussion with English teacher Lida Baker next week.
AA: But we will tell you about a free Grammar and Writing Guide on a Web site she found. It's sponsored by the Capital Community College Foundation, a non-profit organization in Connecticut.
RS: It's a long address, so to make it easy to find we'll post a link on our site, voanews.com/wordmaster. And our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble. 

(Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)

Thứ Sáu, 1 tháng 8, 2014

Compounding

WWW.ẨMTHỰCSẠCH.COM 17:51

AA: I'm Avi Arditti. Rosanne Skirble is away, but joining me from Los Angeles is English teacher Lida Baker to explain our topic on Wordmaster this week. It's a feature of the language called compounding. 



LIDA BAKER: "Compounding is when we take two words in English and we put them together to make a brand-new word. For example, you can take the word race and the word car and you can put it together and you have a race car. But interestingly you can also combine those two words together in the opposite order, car plus race. And then you have ... "
AA: "Car race."

LIDA BAKER: "Car race, which is a kind of ... "

AA: "Race."

LIDA BAKER: "Isn't that interesting? So a race car is a kind of car and a car race is a kind of race. One of the rules, I guess, of the meaning of compounds in English is that the core meaning is the word on the right."

AA: "So what are some other examples?"

LIDA BAKER: "Well, there are all kinds of compounds in English. The most common ones are when we combine two nouns -- so race car, housekeeper. One of the things that's confusing about compounds is the spelling, because sometimes it's written as two words; for example, race car. Sometimes it's written as one word; for example, housekeeper. And sometimes it's written with a hyphen. I actually would have to check this myself, but I think the word baby-sitter is written with a hyphen.

"Now the point is, even native speakers of English don't always know how to spell compounds and they have to consult a dictionary. So I would give my students exactly the same advice.

"Now let's move away from the written language and talk about the spoken language. There is a unique feature of compounds which is that the first word is normally the one -- well, always the one that is stressed. So notice, for example, that we say RACE car, HOUSE keeper, BLACK bird, MAKE up, BABY sitter. You see how the first -- we've talked on this program about word stress before. In a compound the first word is the one that gets stressed, and that's one of the things that actually identities it as a compound. What if you have, for example -- well, where does the president of the United States live?"

AA: "In the White House."

LIDA BAKER: "In the WHITE House, and it's stressed on the first word. But I live in a white HOUSE. So there's a difference between a compound which is a unit that has a meaning of its own, like White House, which is the residence of the president of the United States, as opposed to a house that happens to be white. Another famous example of that is blackbird, which is a specific type of bird, and a black bird as opposed to a blue bird or a red bird, you see?

AA: "Uh-huh."

LIDA BAKER: "So what we have to do in the classroom -- first of all, explain to students what I just explained to you, and then do what we call ear training. I can propose a couple of activities that teachers can do that can help students to learn compounds. One of them is a simple matching activity where you have two columns. And what the students have to do is take a word from the first column and match it with a word in the second column and create the compound and then practice saying it correctly. So, a simple matching activity.

"But there's another activity that is really fun, and that is to take these -- you know how we were talking about the difference between 'White House' and 'white house' or 'blackbird' and 'black bird'? You take those phrases and you try to create -- this is kind of for advanced students -- but try to make one sentence that contains both of those. So as an example: 'I saw a white house on my way to the White House?' Can you hear the difference?"

AA: "Uh-huh."

LIDA BAKER: "Or I saw a black bird, but I'm not sure if it's a blackbird.' I've done this and it's a lot of fun. You see students, you know, they're pounding on the desk trying to figure out where the stressed word is and so on."

AA: Lida Baker, speaking to us from the VOA bureau in Los Angeles. Her most recent books are "Real Talk" and "Real Talk 2: Authentic English in Context." And that's Wordmaster for this week. You can learn more about American English at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster. I'm Avi Arditti.

MUSIC: "Blackbird"/Beatles
(Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)

A Fast Way to Make Yourself a Better Understood Speaker

WWW.ẨMTHỰCSẠCH.COM 09:09

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: More advice about giving oral presentations.

Last week English teacher Nina Weinstein talked about ways to get mentally prepared. The most important part of any speech is you, Nina says. But for the audience, the focus is not you but the information they are there to get. And one way for English language learners to make themselves more understandable is to slow down.
Listening online or Download mp3


NINA WEINSTEIN: "You can't make your pronunciation perfect if it's not there yet. You need to take pronunciation classes or whatever, but you still have to give your speech. And so one of the most effective ways to be understood is to cut your speed in half. Whenever you're speaking to a group you have to slow down anyway, even if you're a native speaker. So that's one technique.
"Another technique is to open your mouth wider. A lot of times students feel that they're pronouncing the 'th' sound or the 'w' sound or the 'b' sound fully, but in actuality if their mouths are not open wide, then maybe thirty percent of the sound is being trapped. And so just doing those two things makes it easier for the audience to understand you no matter what level you are."
RS: "So how would you practice doing these skills? Basically what we've talked about is the end game, of actually making a presentation. How do you get there? How do you practice -- can you divide this up into bits?"
AA: "Do you write out the speech word for word and try to memorize it?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "No, no, I don't encourage my students to do that, and none of the places that I've taught have encouraged that. If you write it out word for word, then what you're ultimately going to do is memorize it, and then you're reading. You just memorize something, and you're kind of giving that as if you're reading it. No, I have my students put it on three-by-five cards and just put lines as if they're outlining it, just put things that will help them with the sequence of it, so they don't forget something that they want to say.
"As far as the actual practicing of it, they practice in front of a mirror, we practice in class. But one of the things that they should do that I think is really effective is to have someone videotape them. Because one of the issues about giving a speech is controlling your body language.
"You don't want to stand like a statue, but on the other hand you don't want nervous gestures. I had a student who played with his hair the whole time, so that becomes really distracting and it focuses the audience's attention on the fact that he's nervous.
"So if you videotape, you're going to see something like that. Or sometimes students will kind of sway back and forth a little bit or maybe they're holding the cards in their hands and they're tapping on them with their index finger, or those kinds of things that can be caught if they videotape."
AA: "And kind of look back and forth across the audience as you talk, look in front and in back? What do you tell people to do with their gaze?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "They need to make eye contact. What happens sometimes is that students will sweep the audience but they won't go all the way to each side, so the people on the ends are left out. And that's how it feels as an audience member if the speaker doesn't look at you, you feel as if you've been left out.
"So you want to make sure that you're looking at everyone. You don't have to actually look at them, but you have to look in their direction, so it feels like you're looking at them. In a small group, you actually will be looking at them. But let's say that you're speaking in front of fifty people or a hundred people. You won't actually be looking at each person, but you'll be sweeping the room so that it looks like you are."
RS: "And just moving on beyond the classroom, how do you think that by doing these kinds of oral presentations in the classroom can help them with their English language learning outside the classroom?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "I think it can help them in every way. First of all, they get confidence because they feel what it is to be in control of English. I think when we learn another language we know that we're not in control. We're trying our best and we're juggling so many different skill areas and so forth. But the tricks that I teach them, the slowing down, the opening your mouth wider, if there's a grammar issue and people don't understand, you can go back to the basic grammar structure of subject-verb-object -- these are all tricks and tools for them to control themselves in English.
"And so I think once they feel that, my students tell me that they apply it to their other classes, whether they're giving oral presentations or they're just expressing their opinion in a class. It's basically the same skill."
AA: English teacher and author Nina Weinstein comes to us from the VOA bureau in Los Angeles. Her books are available through Amazon.com. And you can find previous segments with Nina at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster. And that's WORDMASTER for this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti

(Nguon: VOANEWS- E&J CAFE TH)


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