Terry Phillips blog

Clusters in Arabic

Terry — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:24:28 +0000

I have gone on record in the Language and Culture notes for the Arabic edition of Skills in English teacher’s book as saying that Arabic has few clusters. I am indebted to H Ibraheem who works in Al Ain in the UAE for the following information about clusters in Arabic.

In Arabic there is what we call ( sukoun) It is written as a little circle on top of letters. It simply means no vowel sound so once the consonant has this ( sukoun ) the following consonant is pronounced just after it without adding any vowel sound between them. She provides excellent examples but I’m afraid this blog system does not seem to allow me to add the tables.

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Doubled letters - any rules?

Terry — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 14:28:22 +0000

I’m trying to find out if there are any productive rules for the appearance of doubled letters in words. Obviously, double e represents the sound /i:/ and double o often represents the sound /u:/. And we all know about doubling of consonants with suffixes when we have CVC at the end of the root word. But what about doubling elsewhere? There seems to be a relationship in many cases between doubling and stress. The doubling appears at the end of the stressed syllable, for example, in words like ‘fallacy, in’telligent, ad’mittance, a’ccommodate, un’missable but what about ‘balance, ‘telephone, di’minish etc. Why no doubling here? Presumably, ‘telephone is because the root of part of the word is tele not telle. So is root more important than sound?

Any ideas anyone?

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Salience in spoken language

Terry — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 09:15:09 +0000

Here’s another interesting piece of research, reported by Steve Tauroza.

“The instability of word-final consonants in spoken English isregarded as a potential problem for second language (L2) listeners.However, research on first language listening comprehensionraises doubts as to whether the sounds at the ends of wordsare important in the word recognition process. An experimentwas conducted to check whether the degree to which word-finalconsonants are realized affects word recognition. It was foundthat there was no significant difference in the subjects’ successin recognizing words, regardless of whether the words’ finalconsonants were fully realized or not. The finding indicatesthat exercises which focus EFL learners’ attention on soundsat the ends of words make the learners practise a strategy thatneither they nor L1 listeners would normally use.”

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Student access to websites

Terry — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 09:07:19 +0000

Someone has written to me to say that students are accessing the materials on the site. Students certainly should NOT have access to the site at the moment - I can only imagine someone has been foolish enough to give out the log in details in class. If anyone else has this problem, can you tell me where you are teaching so I can look into it further.
In the meantime, there is obviously something you can do personally about the problem. Explain to your students that you are teaching them not testing them. If they download materials with answers, they will not learn anything. They will not even fool you, because you will know that they have seen the answers already.

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Salience in spoken language

Terry — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:45:50 +0000

As any one who has been to recent lectures of mine knows, I have been going on for quite a long time now about the differences between salience in written language and salience in spoken language. By salience I mean how observable something is. I have now been sent, by Dennis Delany from Excel College, a superb article by someone called Steve Tauroza who is or was Senior Lecturer in the Department of English of the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong and clearly something of an expert on salience in spoken language. The article concerned is entitled ‘Recognizing the Negative Particle in Speech: Problems and Implications’ and he makes the point which I have developed in my lectures, that negative particles are often not heard, with, of course, potentially disastrous results - ‘The yellow wire must(n’t) touch the red wire.’ Mr Tauroza goes on to make two other extremely important points. Firstly, he says that teachers often don’t think there is any problem in perceiving the negative particle (after all, it is easy to see in written language - my idea, not his) . Secondly, he says that non-perception of a negative early in a text may lead to listeners constructing a false scenario and then finding it difficult to fit later information into it.

My solution to this issue is NOT trying to enable students to perceive the negative particle - this is futile. Rather, we should focus on showing students what other features appear in a negative sentence. Some examples:

With ‘can’t‘ the vowel is longer (at least in British English!)

With ‘wouldn’t‘, you only hear ‘would’ if the sentence is negative; otherwise it’s generally elided to ‘d’

With negatives of irregular past tense verbs, you only hear the infinitive if the verb is negative. (This is useful because, in real life, we normally know that a person is talking about the past before we are called upon to determine whether a verb is positive or negative.

There are other markers of the presence of the negative as well, including:

at all - I don’t go there at all

but to show that the coming information contrasts - I went there but I didn’t see him

even - You mustn’t even move.

The point is - let’s teach students to recognise the features of negation other than the negative particle and then they should be able to infer the presence of the particle even if they can’t hear it.

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Stress

Terry — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 11:38:40 +0000

In response to Abdulkareem, I think there are, in fact, quite a few productive patterns if not rules relating to phonology which most language teachers don’t know. Because there are so many exceptions, I think there has been a tendency to say ‘English is a stupid language’ and leave it at that. But that doesn’t help the student to be an independent learner. I will start posting things I’ve discovered as an occasional series on this site.

With regard to access to the site, anyone who is actually using the books can have access to parts of the site. Send me an email - terry@wtcinelt.com - with details of the levels and skills you are teaching and some information about where - for our marketing department, and I will arrange for a log in to be set up for you.

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Stress in multi-word noun phrases

Terry — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:22:20 +0000

I have been struggling with the rules for stress in noun phrases. I don’t know how I failed to learn this at some previous time but I did.

It’s obviously extremely valuable to be able to give rules but are there any which are sufficiently productive to be useful?

This is my thinking at the moment:

NOUN NOUN compounds have primary stress on the first noun.

Examples: ‘oil rig, ‘coal mine; su’pport system; ‘car factory

ADJECTIVE NOUN phrases have primary stress on the noun.

Examples: global ‘warming; educational a’chievement; tall ‘person

Even when you add more words before these root phrases, the primary stress obeys these rules. Thus:

NOUN / ADJECTIVE + NOUN NOUN will have the stress on the first noun of the noun noun compound:

Examples: North Sea ‘oil rig; ancient ‘coal mine; Honda ‘car factory

NOUN/ADJECTIVE + ADJECTIVE NOUN will have the stress on the noun.

Examples: reduced global ‘warming; graduate educational a’chievement; exceptionally tall ‘person

Do these ‘rules’ seem right? I can think of a few exceptions immediately, like car ‘door. Is this because we sometimes think of the noun as an adjective?

Of course, all these stress ‘rules’ apply to the neutral or unmarked phrase. If I want to talk about my black cat, I will say I have a black ‘cat. but to distinguish one of two cats I can say, Look at the ‘black cat.

Also the University Grammar of English gives a nice example, contrasting ‘toy factory = a factory making toys and toy ‘factory = a toy which is a factory.

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Teachers are good at teaching

Terry — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 09:44:18 +0000

I have just read another article from the anti-coursebook lobby, about getting teachers to be syllabus designers, researchers course writers, test writers… I will never understand this approach, which manages to overwork and undervalue teachers at the same time. Teachers teach - that’s what they do. Good teachers bring material to life in the classroom, motivate students, work out the interlanguage of each student and supply the necessary information to move them on to the next level. This is a vital job and syllabus designers, course writers etc would be nowhere without them. Sometimes they move on to be syllabus designers, course writers, test writers. But these are different professions. It’s like saying to an actor - you know about acting so why don’t you write the play, do the stage management and write the critical review as well. End of rant.

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Becoming a blogger

Terry — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 08:02:19 +0000

It’s good to see that there have already been some comments so I am not just shouting in an empty room! The problem is, at the moment, I’m not sure what one says on a blog. I certainly don’t want to write things like: ‘Just going to have a cup of coffee’ - although I am, as a matter of fact. I guess like any writing work, it is the blank page which terrifies. Once you begin to fill it, the task does not seem so daunting.

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Hello world!

admin — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:31:48 +0000

Hi. This is my first blog, but, presumably, in years to come, I will wonder how I ever lived without it.

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