The English Trainer

A few years ago there was a series of adverts by the drinks company Carlsberg. The punchline was "if Carlsberg did <supermarkets, golf courses etc>, they would probably be the best in the world" which was intended to show how great their lager was. The line, "if Carlsberg did..." seems to have made its way into common speech, to describe something that has or would work perfectly. My 'if Carlsberg did English lessons' happened today . We were discussing the difficulties of talking on the phone and what happens when you have to spell your name or address . One of the students said, "it would be great if you could tell us the words to help us spell the letters, like a is for apple etc". As it happens, I had the next part of the lesson dedicated to teaching them the phonetic alphabet for spelling. Afterwards, the student told me how useful it had been for her. It is incredibly useful to be able spell confidently and easily on the phone, as t...

It was the first of one of my English conversation classes after a long break and one of the activities I had decided to do was Taboo. It was a new class, and I wasn't sure how it would work as I didn't know the students. I modelled the basic idea behind the game, there is a word that people have to guess, for example, 'bones' but they cannot mention the 'Taboo' words such as break, skeleton, broken, dog. I split the class up into four groups as it was a large-ish class of 23. The students got the idea and were amazingly creative about how they described the words. This ability is incredibly useful when it comes to communicating and not knowing a particular word, should not stop students from being understood.

I was asked by a student to teach her better pronunciation, she wanted to sound like a native English speaker. I will correct students' pronunciation when it's hard to understand, but when a student is producing the target language correctly, and can be understood, then I don't interfere. Some people do have the goal of sounding like a native speaker, but the question is, which native speaker do you want to sound like? The Queen? Theresa May? Me? Essentially I think it boils down to accent , and which accent you want to speak with. My personal opinion is that I like regional accents, it reminds us of our origins and is an easy conversation starter when you meet someone now. I've never tried to change my accent, although it has changed over the years as I have lived in different places. So to change the accent of a student, more than merely helping them to say a particular word, I feel this is out of my remit and more for a voice coach to work on. 

There was some confusion amongst my students last week when one student had seen a video on the internet which had some tips for the speaking part of the IELTS exam. One of the tips was to use fillers such as 'urm' when speaking to try and sound more like a native speaker. It is true, native speakers do use fillers such as 'urm', when they are trying to think of what they want to say. It is also true that some native speakers overuse these fillers. There are however, other filler phrases which you can use if you want a bit more time to think. "Oh, that's an interesting question, my opinion would be..." or even the simple, "I'm sorry, I didn't quite hear that" to get the examiner to repeat the question and give you some more time to think. You can also paraphrase the question to give yourself more time to think. "Why do some people choose to read the news on the internet rather than in a newspaper?" You could say out loud to your...