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What’s the meaning of life? What’s my purpose in the universe? Relax: This text is not about it.

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Assess Your Real Needs.

Have you ever stopped to think about the meaning of learning English? Relax, again. I’m not about to tell you of the wonderful land of learning. What I want is to help you evaluate what you really need.

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So let’s start like this:

As a private English teacher I am usually contacted by students that express their demand like this: “I need to learn English”.

So I start my interview like this:

Who are you? What do you want to learn English for?.

Let’s look into likely (or not so likely) possible answers:

- I’m an undergraduate student, about to graduate in Geography, and I’ll try for graduation. I need to take a test, in which I’ll be asked to translate something, probably from a classical author in the field.

- I’m getting ready to travel to the US, because I want to be a fluent speaker, but I feel that I first need to improve my English.

- I’m a professor at Universidad Autonóma de Occidente. I’ve been working at Universidade de São Paulo for some years, publishing with other researchers, but I’d like to improve my writing skills because I feel that I’m too dependent on translators. I’d also like to improve my speaking skills for taking part in congresses in my area.

- Maaan, my hero is G.I. Joe, I wanna join the army and get to use some explosive stuff, cause it’s soooo cool, dude.

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There could be a lot of reasons for learning English. Depending on what you want, you need to focus on very specific skills. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t improve on your general skills. What I mean is you get what you want quicker when you know what you need.

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Let’s say you are looking for a scholarship abroad. May that be in Germany, Japan, or Saudi Arabia, you can be accepted in an institution if you know English, and knowing English, for academic institutions, means that you got a score on one of these tests.
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One of the ways for people in Brazil to get these scholarships is through research funding institutions such as CNPq, CAPES and FAPESP, in São Paulo. I’d have a lot of (bad) things to mention about FAPESP,but sometimes we have to think of these institutions as a feature of nature. I mean, you cannot change the landscape or the climate, so you learn to live with it. Let’s look into FAPESP’s page about “Bolsas no Exterior”

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Correct me if I’m wrong. For an outside observer it looks like what FAPESP says is acceptable, the other institutions follow. In that case, we can conclude that IELTS is as good as TOEFL (I’ve been accessing FAPESP’s page for about ten years, and that’s the one thing that does not change: both tests always appear there, side by side).
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For a plethora of reasons that would bore the reader to death, my favorite is IELTS. Let’s briefly mention some:
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1.    it doesn’t change, so you can use old studying materials (for TOEFL you have to spend at least R$ 300,oo on the newest books),
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2.    it never brings these new fashions in TESOL (Teaching English to Students of Other Languages) into play. One of the most recent craze in TESOL is called “mixed skills”. It’s something of the newest old idea, meaning that in class you plan activities that don’t focus on one only skill (either writing, listening, speaking, pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary) but mix them in the same activity. Can we conclude that what’s good for learning is also good for testing? I don’t think so. Call me traditionalist if you may, but every scientist knows that when you’re trying to measure one variable, you must set the other variables fixed. Besides, it’s confusing for testees, and prone to cause errors that have more to do with specific testing skills than with the testees’ level of English.
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3.    you talk to a person. That’s why IELTS is a little more expensive (although, if you include the cost of material, you’ll see that TOEFL gets much more expensive). The speaking test takes you from a basic free talking to the most advanced presentation part, (probably) taking into account that testees are not in an English speaking environment to start with. At TOEFL you do the presentation to a recording computer; you have 15 seconds to think and organize your answer and 45 seconds to say it aloud.

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.Well, I could go on. But as a teacher, TOEFL is but a feature of nature: sometimes my students have to take it, so I teach it. TOEFL is much more commercial, there are many more institutions where you can take it, so it’s much more broadly known.
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What’s the problem with English? Words are difficult to read aloud and when you listen to a word it’s difficult to spell them. So, let’s first go through some considerations.

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Some alphabetic languages, such as Spanish, have relatively simple spelling because there is nearly a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letter patterns that represent them.

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English spelling is more complex, because it attempts to represent (about) 40 phonemes (specific sounds) of the spoken language with an alphabet composed of only 26 letters (and with no help of accents). As a result, two letters are often fused together into groups that represent distinct sounds, referred to as digraphs. For example “t” and “h” placed side by side are used to represent either /θ/ or /ð/, which are different from the sounds of “t” and “h” alone.
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Why are sounds difficult to write? why are words difficult to read?

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In other words: Why isn’t there a one-to-one correspondence between the graphic representations (spelling) and phonemes (sounds)?

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It’s not only in English that this problem happens. In Portuguese, for Example, The pronunciation of “m” in “mamãe” is different from the pronunciation of “m” in “bem” or “tem”. In the word “também” the 1st and the 2nd “m” sound different. The same happens with “l”, which is pronounced differently in “janela” and “sol”.

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The problem in English is in its history: It has absorbed large amounts of words from other languages over time, without changing the spelling of those words (without anglicizing them). As a result, the written form of English includes the spelling patterns of five languages (Old English, Old Norse, Norman French, Classical Latin and Greek) superimposed upon one another.

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Sometimes the same phenomenon happens in Portuguese, although it is rarer. Have you ever tried to order a “Mupy” pronouncing the word as you should read it in Portuguese? I have, many times: I was never understood =(
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So English has not anglicized the words adopted from other languages. This means that in many cases the same sound can be spelled differently and the same spelling can represent different sounds. For example, the letters ee almost always represent /iː/, but the sound can also be represented by the letters e (as in “evening”),  y (as in “tiny”) ey (“Mickey”), ea (“leave”), and more rarely as ei (as in receive”).

Okay, that can be confusing, but there’s no reason for panic. The spelling patterns usually follow certain conventions. To be able to understand these conventions you’ll need first to understand some concepts (basic concepts of what different sounds have in common, and may, thus, fall into the same categories).
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Let’s start by the beginning: “And said God let there be light, and there was light…” (ks, ks). Okay… not from the beginning beginning… Let’s start with vowels.
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Vowel phonics patterns

.•    Short vowels are the five single letter vowels, a, e, i, o, and u when they produce the sounds /æ/ as in cat, /ɛ/ as in get, /ɪ/ as in sit, /ɒ/ as in hot, and /ʌ/ as in cup. listen (for more)

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•    Long vowels have the same sounds as the names of the single letter vowels, such as /eɪ/ in baby, /iː/ in me, /aɪ/ in I, /oʊ/ in go, and /juː/ in dude. Long vowels sounds are taught as being “the same as the names of the letters.” listen (for more)

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•     Schwa – all vowels can have the sound of shwa in English. The schwa is an indistinct sound of a vowel in an unstressed syllable, represented by the linguistic symbol /ə/. It is the sound made by the o in lesson, the a in about, the u in butter, the e in taken, or the i in pencil.

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That’s all for now. In time, you’ll see that if you follow the phonics lessons you’ll get a better idea of how to read and write words in English.

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for further practice: the podcasts at this page can be a little too overwhelmingly detailed for the begginner’s taste. I suggest for a practice that you click on the links under the topic Sound pronunciation practice (left column) and do the exercises there (for both pages on long and short vowels), instead of listening to the podcast.

In terms of difficulty, voanew’s listening files at Special English is a pre-intermediate listening for its pace. It doesn’t mean they are shallow, though. And they don’t simplify grammar or vocabulary too much.

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Voanews is a traditional news agency – Voice of America. Its Special English program is an inclusive progam: it’s meant for immigrants who reside in America, to help them learn the language and become part of their society.

Students of English all around the globe have been using its files to improve their listening. Years ago, when I started teaching private students, I wanted to find radio programs that were not too advanced and not too dumb and I could never find one. Til a student of mine introduced me to Special English on Voanews

Well… at least for pronunciation.

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Every now and then, when I’m teaching, I come across a phenomenon for which I had never found any comprehensive teaching material. I’ve been teaching English for 11 years, so you can guess my amazement (and relief) when I finally bumped into it on Wikipedia.

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Some words, when pronounced with a different stress have a grammatical change: stress the first syllable and you’ll be saying a noun; stress another, and you’ll mean anything else (a verb, an adjective…)

that’s what happens with words like:

• conflict.

as a verb, “I hope that won’t conFLICT in any way.”

as a noun, “There will be no CONflict.”

• record.

as a verb, “Remember to reCORD the show!“.

as a noun, “I’ll keep a RECord of that request.”

• permit.

as a verb, “I won’t perMIT that.“

as a noun, “We already got a PERmit.”

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the phenomenon is called Inicial Stress Derived Noun, and you can find all about it on wikipedia

Phonetics is the study of the articulations in our vocal organs used to produce the sounds of speech. Click on the image and follow the link to learn more.

Some peoples take things very seriously. That’s the case with the Swiss.

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Now… Seriously: Basic Facts about Switzerland

“A country of west-central Europe. The region was conquered by Germanic tribes in the 5th century and by Swabia and Burgundy in the 9th, becoming part of the Holy Roman Empire in 1033. Protesting Hapsburg control in the 13th century, the Swiss formed a defense league made up of cantons that became the basis of their confederation, and by 1499 they had achieved independence. The Reformation in the 16th century led to religious civil wars that lasted through the next two centuries. The French took brief control of Switzerland during the French Revolution, but the confederacy was restored in 1815. Switzerland later adopted a federal constitution (1848) and maintained a policy of neutrality through both World Wars. Bern is the capital and Zurich the largest city. Population: 7,550,000.”

in dictionary.com

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Find something interesting about Switzerland and leave it in the comments

a trivia,

a rock group,

a link to a BBC article…