Those reflective learners
who ponder their strategies
and revise them
ESSAY by J Enrique B
for a handful of similar stuff ... here
A reflective learner ponders about the power of spoken words
Throughout this academical year, I've
tried to improve my oral skills by speaking aloud and recording myself, mainly.
Analysing my own speech has been one of my best allies in the task of
correcting an endless number of personal mistakes related to intonation and
stress patterns.
In general terms, transcribing and
improving a spontaneous speech before recording myself back ( like in
class-life activities "My Leisure time", "Silly
questions about Literature" or "Those years") have been very
useful tasks, particularly to do better some aspects related to fluency.
Working on dialogues of different
films Lethal weapon, French kiss, The
accidental tourist - has been a new task for me. I've felt it particularly
interesting to practise "real English", that includes repetition of
words as well as false starts, noises, intonation problems and, of course,
pronunciation. But in the wrong side, ther is always an dark side, it is the
fact that you have to spend a lot of time only for preparing the text, that,
moreover, has to be read in its own atmosphere, alone, quiet.
Practising "theoretical
sounds" (Oxford Headway Upper Intermediate Pronunciation)
is a quite boring activity, although I have to reckon that after training the
different tones a lot of times, I have made improvements in the quality of the
sounds, but even in this way, some of them are a hopeless question. Up to now I
have included a list of them in the section "Working with the text book”).
In this part of my work I've added some conversations only for working on
specific sounds that can be practised following our parallel reading technique.
I've met up different people only
with the purpose of improving in a practical way my oral skills but, by
different reasons our relationships has been a sort of minefield. Perhaps, we
have not been on the same wavelength or our aims were not in harmony.
I've realized I've brushed up in
listening skills throughout this year, particularly by avoiding the wish of
understanding all the words of the dialogues. Writing the phrases that you can
identify while you are listening to people, in a sort of quick-writing, is a
recommendable experience. It is a hard activity but it has proven to be the
most valuable one in the end.
When I've started feeling stuck in a kind
of plateau, films, comics - see Tintin's
adventures in Writing File - and music - Frank Sinatra's songs were the first
ones that I could understand effortlessly - have been my loyal friends albeit
being done My way. Listening again
old records, nostalgic bits and pieces you had worked thru in the past, a constructive task that can encourage you in
the worst moments. Going down yourself is useless.
I've been aware of the fact that
working with tapes and doing regularly both
parallel reading and a varied range Listening
tasks –even self-dictation with a clip of a commercial!- are invaluable
activities, mainly as instruments of improving aspects like rhythm, imitation
or emphasis. Step by step, you can discover new discourse markers or new ways
of encouraging the speakers. I've worked these topics with Listening Advanced -Oxford,
CAE course cassettes and our Masterclass cassettes.
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