Virgin Webinar by Judy Thompson

Saturday December 12, 2015

12:00 EST (Toronto time)

Agenda

Three Introductions: Me, You, Pronunciation

The Teaching Model today and always:

Lesson, Exercises, Transformation – how to get learners using what they’ve studied in real life

Lesson: Begin at the Beginning – individual sounds

An empowering approach I use for teaching speaking - You know this already or how to avoid teaching learners what they already know (boring them)

Links to resources

Judy Thompson I graduated from University with

a BA in English

Married, four children and lived on a horse farm

Divorced, children to school and I became an ESL teacher

Manuel story changed everything

Developed my system and started my company

TEDx , Radical Teachers, teach English around the world

Webinars!!!

Participants Teachers participate for different reasons:

Most are teachers who have avoided teaching pronunciation completely for whatever reasons

Some (the bravest) teach Pronunciation but don’t feel their students are speaking as well as they could be

A few are just plain open-minded pioneers who embrace learning for its own sake

Students

More and more are students find their own education solutions on the internet and pursue them

I applaud all of you and thank you for being here

How English Got To Be So Messed Up

Notes on the History Timeline Olde English was a combination of German and Norse

Adding French in 1066 became Middle English

English was spoken for 1,000 yrs before it was written

William Caxton ruined English for all of time by using an alphabet (26 symbols) that didn’t fit (40 sounds)

Spelling was random then all those mistakes were canonized in the Big Book of Mistakes – the dictionary

Caxton effectively split English into two languages, Writing and Speaking

We are only taught to teach Writing because Speaking was in place before attending school

We teach Writing and hope for results in Speaking but that virtually never happens

Humans Figure Out Talking Young

What Caxton Did to English

Talk About Broken English

Reading/Writing uses 26 symbols in the smaller blue circle on the left

Listening/Speaking uses 40 symbols in the larger pink circle on the right

Consonants above the line, Vowels below the line

The purple space in the middle is where the two versions of English intersect. This is where you start to teach pronunciation

Notes: You don’t need c, q or x in pronunciation

Vowels don’t make any sense at all. i.e. u in busy, o in women, e in in pretty, ui in build... all make the same short i sound

We Have to Make a Phonetic Alphabet

I’ll write out why you don’t need c, q or x

Their sounds are represented by other symbols

Usually ca, co, cu is /k/’ cap, cop, cup

Usually ci, ce, cy is /s/ - city, celery, cycle

But spelling is actually random

c is /sh/ in ocean and social, chef, machine

c is /ch/ in cello, cappuccino...

c is silent in muscle and scissors

q is /kw/

x is /gz/ in exam, /ks/ in excite, /z/ in Xerox

Notes for the Beginning

If I haven’t said this before, consonant sounds stop and vowel sounds stretch

We know Reading/Writing and Listening/Speaking are completely different languages in English

We have the ABC alphabet for Reading/Writing

(it doesn’t work well but we have one)

We don’t have an alphabet for Listening/Speaking

We’ll make a simple phonetic alphabet that uses keyboard symbols so anyone can read what English sounds like

Sound Notation

24 English Consonant Sounds

Six New Consonant Sounds

Transformation:

/Sh/ - shoe, sugar, ocean, machine, nation

Note: Capital letters indicate two symbols work together

Teach Consonants First

It’s validating: Learners have most of the consonant sounds they need for English from their first language

It’s empowering: Students experience real success right out of the gate – “I know all this already”

Customize: Focus on the few sounds that your students are missing, usually the ‘th’ sounds, ‘y’ as /j/ for Spanish speakers, consonant blends and final consonants for Asian speakers, ‘w’ as /w/ not /v/ for East Indian speakers...

Dry Run: Use consonants to teach how the styles of exercises work: Mystery Match, Sound Mazes, Minimal Pairs... so when we get to vowel sounds – which are tricky, students are not overwhelmed trying to figure out how the sound focus exercises work

btw - there are unlimited individual sound focus exercises

Recap – Back Up to the First Day

Talk about the History of English

1. Provides context for what students have learned (Why they don’t speak English after years of study)

2. Give students an opportunity to listen to your voice

3. Talk about the teeter-totter action in Speaking class! The first day the teachers does the talking and students listen. They gradually switch until the students do all the talking – it’s a Speaking Class

4. On the next slide is a Killer Ice-Breaker Exercise

Set your students up for Transformation from the first day.

Sowing the Seeds of Success

Old Friends

More Transformation

Past Tense ‘ed’ Exercise video link: http://bit.ly/1NoBzT7

Humans Figure Out Talking Young

Revisit Our 3-Step Model

Lesson: deliver relevant information

To do this you have to distinguish what you learned to teach from what students need to know. It’s not the same thing.

Practice: there are unlimited exercises possibilities

Transformation: This is the goal. Skills and systems that work for students in real life when the teacher is not there

So far we have taught that:

spelling never tells us how words are pronounced

how to develop and trust their inner ear for generating speaking (not reading)

Student Transformations in this Webinar There was a shift in consciousness for learners:

When they saw the History of English and where English split into Writing and Speaking

When they saw Vennglish where the writing and speaking symbols intersect

With the Killer Ice-Breaker and they introduced themselves with an adjective (but it was subconscious)

When they saw Sound Notation with dog and /woof/

There was a shift at the /sh/ sugar and nation

Old Friends when they sounded exactly like a native speaker

‘ed’ Past Tense Exercise and they could discern between sounds when the spelling gave no clue

Conclusion

We talked about Context for Speaking English as in not connected to writing in any meaningful way

We talked about the 3-Step Teaching/Learning Model Lesson, Practice, Transformation I use for everything

We talked about You know this already as an approach that harvests tools and information that intelligent, language speaking individuals already possess in order to make your lessons easy to digest, super relevant and validating for learners

The Speaking Made Simple curriculum is six steps to fluency and each step is delivered exactly the same way

Resources

Free 18 YouTube video Playlist of me teaching teachers Speaking Made Simple: http://bit.ly/1H9Sp6R

Email me for free 8.5 x 11 copies of the History of English, Vennglish and Old Friends judy@thompsonlanguagecenter.com

I didn’t intend to pitch on this video but you should know there are books,

posters, materials and a curriculum in the E-Store on my website if you are

interested. http://thompsonlanguagecenter.com/e-store/

Thanks for watching!

The next video is on Pronunciation and Literacy