Listening and Speaking

 Chapter eighteen of Brown’s book is about how to teach listening. Brown talked about things that make listening difficult and how to teach listening. It was interesting to see different ways of teach listening depends on the student’s proficiency. For a long time, I thought that watching American dramas and comic shows will help ELL’s listening skills. I don’t remember how I learned to develop listening skills. I watched lots of movies and dramas in English without the subtitles. Some of my friends still have problems when some Americans speak very fast. However, for me, that wasn’t a problem. I could understand even though when people were speaking fast.

Chapter nineteen of Brown’s book is about things that make speaking difficult and how to teach speaking skills. One of interesting things that make speaking difficult was performance variables. I see many ELL students use fillers of “you know.” I had a friend who used filler of “You know” for every sentence. One of the problems that I have for a long time is using gender pronouns. In Korean, there are no gender pronouns. Therefore, when I talk in English, I always mix up with using gender pronouns. I still don’t know how to fix it. I tried to fix it and I failed. I had friends who are Native speaker. I thought talking with Native speakers would fix the problem. However, my friends who are Native speaker have problems with gender pronouns because of me. In chapter nineteen, it talked about pronunciation. Many people are eager to not have accents. I believe that having accents isn’t a bad thing as long as people can understand and communicate. However, many people assume that people with accents cannot speak English very well. In chapter nineteen, it talked about how to treat errors when ELL students speak English. I believe that correct errors are better than ignoring it. ELL students might feel embarrassed at that moment. However, if a teacher will make environment of making errors and get corrected errors are not embarrassing, it will be good. My boyfriend started to correct mistakes when I spoke with him. At first, I was embarrassed. However, after a while, I wasn’t and I fixed most of the problems that I had.  When I was reading chapter nineteen, there were some questions that came up in my mind. Is it right or wrong to teach students with accents? What is perfect pronunciation? Is perfect pronunciation with or without accents?

In the article, How do I support a student’s first language when I don’t speak the language, is about a teacher named Dolores who teach English to eight students who speak different languages. I loved how Dolores makes her students to greet each other with their own language. I loved how Dolores emphasizes the importance of their L1 language. It is hard to emphasize and have supportive environment to use L1. However, Dolores gave good examples.