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Pronunciation with Wlodek Barbosa
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 every day.
Somewhat tired of this theoretical talk, we then undertook a new activity where avies had to move about a lot, collecting phrase stress data around Virtlantis, to be used in designing tasks/games for other students. This was done in pairs, and took quite some time. What turned out to be particularly difficult was the assignment of correct stress patterns to collected phrases... There was not enough time to finish this activity last night, so task/game preparation was assigned as homework, and next time we're going to see what each pair of students comes up with.
An excerpt from the activity notecard is below, the full version on SLActivities, as usual.
===================================================================================
Pronunciation treasure hunt in Virtlantis
(a word- and phrase-stress version)
-------------------------------------------
(C) Wlodek Barbosa
This complex game has three parts.
In part one players collect pronunciation treasures in the form of names of objects/prims found in Virtlantis. In the given time each player collects as many names as possible, by right-clicking and [editing] objects, and copying their names to a notecard (please DO NOT change spelling in any way, even for typos!). The point of this hunt is to gather many different stress patterns and many object names for each stress pattern: the more variety, the better. Collecting only names of two syllables with the [Oo] stress pattern does not count, for example. The stress pattern should be added to each object name in the notecard, for example: [Table & Chairs OooO]. At the end of the collection phase all objects should be arranged by their stress patterns in the notecard.
Somewhat tired of this theoretical talk, we then undertook a new activity where avies had to move about a lot, collecting phrase stress data around Virtlantis, to be used in designing tasks/games for other students. This was done in pairs, and took quite some time. What turned out to be particularly difficult was the assignment of correct stress patterns to collected phrases... There was not enough time to finish this activity last night, so task/game preparation was assigned as homework, and next time we're going to see what each pair of students comes up with.
An excerpt from the activity notecard is below, the full version on SLActivities, as usual.
===================================================================================
Pronunciation treasure hunt in Virtlantis
(a word- and phrase-stress version)
-------------------------------------------
(C) Wlodek Barbosa
This complex game has three parts.
In part one players collect pronunciation treasures in the form of names of objects/prims found in Virtlantis. In the given time each player collects as many names as possible, by right-clicking and [editing] objects, and copying their names to a notecard (please DO NOT change spelling in any way, even for typos!). The point of this hunt is to gather many different stress patterns and many object names for each stress pattern: the more variety, the better. Collecting only names of two syllables with the [Oo] stress pattern does not count, for example. The stress pattern should be added to each object name in the notecard, for example: [Table & Chairs OooO]. At the end of the collection phase all objects should be arranged by their stress patterns in the notecard.
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