Have you ever listened to native English speakers and thought their speech had a special rhythm — something musical? That’s because of sentence stress. Sentence stress is what gives English its rhythm. In every sentence, some words are stressed — said louder, longer, or higher — while others are spoken more softly or quickly. Learning […]
Did you know that the letters ‘T’ and ‘D’ don’t always sound like /t/ or /d/ in native English speech? The way we pronounce them depends on the sounds that come before or after them. If you learn and apply the five pronunciation rules below, your spoken English will sound much more fluent and natural—especially […]
Many of my students have problems with pronouncing the English vowels, and sometimes, it’s not much that they can’t pronounce them, but rather, it’s that they can’t tell the difference between 2 vowels that may sound close or similar. They may really struggle with distinguishing between minimal pairs such as ‘ship’ and ‘sheep’, ‘walk’ and […]
English hard! I hate it! “English hard, why does it have to be so hard” have repeatedly complained my students! My reaction is “Duh”! How stupid would someone have to be to think language learning, any language learning, can actually be easy! However, no one said it couldn’t be “easIER”! Why English hard? If you […]
Phrasal Verbs: Take your English To A Whole New Level! It’s true. It’s amazing how few are those who know it though. Unfortunately, English learners seem to think of them as slang, so they avoid them. Since they think of them as slang, they do not make them a priority. They’d rather stick to…what was […]
Ever since I finished my TESOL degree and started teaching, my top obsession has been “how could I somehow enable the memory of an adult English learner to achieve what a child’s does. How could I somehow speed up the human processor, that is the brain, so that it could respond to the sounds and messages being transmitted to it quicker? Read on!
English spelling is messy, chaotic and can be one of the biggest and worst nightmares for English learners. It affects your pronunciation, and therefore writing and speaking. Find out how and why!
It’s certainly not by learning the rules of grammar as you would learn the rules of physics, but rather by….well…reading. Yes, it’s that simple, reading everything and anything you can get your hands on. It would help a great deal if you could find something you are really crazy or obsessed about. 20 years ago, […]
Thoughts on English Pronunciation I must have written tens of articles about English pronunciation but I never run out of ideas or other angles to view this topic from. Pronunciation, for the majority of learners, is what they study when having problems being understood. On the other hand, for some, it essentially has to do […]
That is my advice to learners of English as a second or foreign language. That is also my advice to English schools and ESL teachers responsible for creating ESL programs, curricula and textbooks. Just as it says in the title, to improve your speaking, you’ve got to start with listening, and to improve your writing, […]