Welcome to all the new students tonight! Great to see so many coming!
We managed to do two of the planned three activities... Paulina's silent phone worked just fine (despite slight technical problems with private chat), and then we had a look at some <-mb> words which are pronounced without /b/, such as "climb" (the list below; entire notecard on SLactivities). Lots of all kinds of problems here: not only the /b/-less pronunciation, but also troublemakers, such as "tomb" /tu:m/ or "womb"…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on November 25, 2009 at 2:21pm —
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I'm not certain how you see the title of this blogpost on your screens... With three Polish-accented letters it may be quite a challenge to your graphics card :-). I was recently asked about this strange name of the city in central Poland (in which I'm going to have a plenary presentation on Second Life pronunciation teaching in exactly three weeks, BTW). Below is part of my answer, with a snapshot of the this word from John Wells's pronunciation dictionary. Hope this helps (or vice versa :-)…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on November 22, 2009 at 5:04am —
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What a great session! With ten students (including three new ones) it was both exciting and challenging... We did two exercises on phrase stress prepared by two teams as homework: (i) in one similarly stressed phrases had to paired in a list of two dozen, (ii) in the other a phrase with a given stress pattern had to be found in a sentence typed in chat and pronounced by players. Both activities were rather challenging, especially to the newcomers, but quite interesting and fruitful at the same t…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on November 18, 2009 at 2:30pm —
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Last night in our pronunciation session we first had a spontaneous discussion on learner accents, their needs and learning aims. Some students said that without a native-like accent it might be hard to communicate in a foreign language; some others said that as long as the communication can be carried out, the accent does not matter so much. These two positions have been hotly debated by language teaching theorists and practitioners, with opinions divided and more research produced in this area…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on November 12, 2009 at 12:06am —
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Dear pronunciation students,
Kip has laid out some drop boxes, as promised, to help him cover some of the costs of running Virtlantis. Everybody can drop as much as they choose to, of course, and there's no limit of donations :-). This scheme is completely independent of our Wednesday sessions of pronunciation, however. As I've declared a number of times, these will remain free forever. I've also promised to pass on to Kip (via the drop box method) any funds you may choose to pay me (by paying…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on November 11, 2009 at 8:10am —
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Last Wednesday (4th Nov) we did two activities, both notecard-based:
1. 30 non-compound heteroaccentual homographs: a list of thirty words of two syllables each. They can all be stressed on the first or second syllable, with the accompanying difference in grammatical category, meaning and pronunciation. Sometimes the difference is simple to grasp: ['accent] is a noun, while [ac'cent] is a verb, but they mean the same thing: "to place stress on something". Sometimes the difference is more subtle…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on November 8, 2009 at 8:58am —
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Last Wednesday (28th Oct) we continued with English lexacal stress: first we did the homework notecard with 5-syllable word stress patterns, then we had a rather complex activity involving the finder and some PAVed objects. Briefly: the task was to #find objects around by typing their name followed by their stress pattern, like this: #find Table & Chairs OooO. The finder then directed the student to the object, which had some additional information in its [description] field. Students collec…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on October 29, 2009 at 1:00pm —
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Hello Pronunciation Students!
I've updated the walk-through grid in my launchroom. You walk on stones as before, but this time try to navigate the [Ooo] path: only step on stones with three-syllable words in them, stressed on the first syllable. The last -- seventh -- stone in the [Ooo] sequence is marked "End here". The remaining 9 stones have other stress patterns. Have fun!
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on October 24, 2009 at 1:21pm —
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Tonight we did one more activity, a match'm'all, with 4-syllable words (see below for player 1 notecard) and the finder game with 5-syllable words. The former turned out to be quite difficult and took quite some time. The latter was rather easy, even for newcomers, although some words present difficulties in terms of stress placement, for example "laboratory", oOooo in British English, but OooOo in American English :-(. Anyways, the finder game is there, if you want to try it. I will also shortl…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on October 21, 2009 at 2:09pm —
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On the question of money...
Our pronunciations sessions will remain free of charge. Some students have recently given me some lindens to help defray the cost of Virtlantis upkeep... Thank you very much! Let me declare that these lindens will go entirely to cover the mentioned costs, and I will not keep any to myself. The situation is certainly new, and we'll all have to adjuct to it somehow, but, as far as I'm concerned, your decision to give me lindens or not (to pass over to Kip for Virtlanti…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on October 19, 2009 at 5:22am —
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Tonight we practiced stress patterns of 4-syllable words: first with the homework notecard (40 most common 4-syllable words in English), then with an activity (Get'm'all - collecting words with given stress patterns from other players - see player one notecard below), finally with the finder game (the finder will locate a wooden cone if a word is typed with the proper stress pattern - go to my launchroom to try this one). The 4-syllable level turned out to be a good choice. Three syllables would…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on October 14, 2009 at 2:08pm —
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A new version of the walk-through grid is available in my launchroom: the 16 Am-Br words and phrases are now built into the 16 stones of the grid. The task is to walk through the grid on British-speaking stones only. You start with "4 bottles of beer" :-), and then it gets better!. On popular demand I've also widened the gaps between stones somewhat to make it easier to navigate the grid. Enjoy!
…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on October 10, 2009 at 5:20am —
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Last Wednesday we had the last British/American differences session. We talked some more about the 16 recordings used before (8 British and 8 American).
Yoghurt drew student's attention as the case where the /r/ sound was rather weak, so it was not immediately clear if the pronunciation is American or British... Then, we tried another activity: to make full sentences with…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on October 9, 2009 at 7:52am —
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Tonight we looked again at the last Wed's notecard with 60 words and 10 sentences containing phonetically contrasting Br/Am vocabulary. We identified the main areas of difference: pronunciation (or not) of /r/ and vowel differences, for example in words like "body", with /o/ in British and /a/ in American English. Pawlus Twine helped us with American English, which happens to be his accent in EFL... Thank you, Pawlus!
Then we started the surprise activity of "Get them all" (see one of four play…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on September 30, 2009 at 2:21pm —
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What a session! Last Wed we had a completely unexpected and unannounced visit by professor John Ohala, professor emeritus of of University of California at Berkeley, one of the few top experts on phonetics on the world scale. Professor Ohala was visiting where I live in RL and I thought: what a streak of luck: us planning to have a session devoted to Br-Am pronouncing differences and him passing by! Everything was arranged on the spot really: professor Ohala agreed to act as a substitute teacher…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on September 24, 2009 at 10:53am —
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In this first meeting in 2009/2010 we talked about... you guessed it: summer vacation (it was a busy one for all, it seems). The task was to talk continuously for one minute, which happens to be an enormous stretch of time, if you try to do that :-). We also reviewed what we did last year, and discussed wishes and preferences for this year. One of these was to have some help from a native speaker of American English... Any reading these words? Finally, we had some fun with the phonetic transcrip…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on September 16, 2009 at 1:49pm —
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... will be coming back real soon now :-)
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on September 5, 2009 at 4:41am —
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My presentation on Phonetically Augmented Virtuality (PAV) to members of OsnaGroup (see evovwll on ning) was held in my Virtlantis launchroom on July 9th 2009. I'm happy to present some audio recordings (mp3 files of reasonable size; thanks go to Pawlus Twine for recording) of the meeting:
(i)
PAVed objects,
(ii)
PAV finder,
(iii)…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on July 13, 2009 at 6:30am —
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On Wednesday, July 8th, we had our last pronunciation session this (academic) year. We had a look at what we've covered in the 42 meetings since last August (see the partial list below)... Phew... A lot :-) I collected remarks about which pronouncing problems are particularly difficult and worth looking at next year. At the top of the list were: (i) vowel digraphs (sequences of two vowel letters), (ii) juncture (the linking of words in connected speech), (iii) function words, such as preposition…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on July 9, 2009 at 10:16am —
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I'm very excited about this one... It took an inordinate amount of time to prepare :-) Speaking in a rigid 20 sec slide frame is terribly hard! Try it if you do not believe :-) The content is well known to those on slenglish, but it will now be widely popularized through
YouTube,
BlipTV and
Avalon.
Hope y…
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Added by Włodzimierz Sobkowiak on July 2, 2009 at 2:30pm —
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