Archive for March, 2008

Learn From the Newspapers

March 6, 2008

Nowadays newspapers are no longer just circulated in the newsstands. They went digital, too. You can read all major newspaper online, most for free. Any serious English learners, especially those in advanced level, would take advantage of it and read at least one good-quality English newspapers everyday. It’s a necessity. No one has ever learned a decent English by going with the ESL textbooks only, even the best ones.

Going digital also frees newspaper from the written words. Several newspaper started to report in short video format along with the text. This brought out a side benefit for English learners, as the video reports are great listening comprehension materials.

We strongly recommend two of them: New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Both have done the video reports as good as their written articles. The videos are usually a few minutes long and easy to follow. You can watch the videos at their websites. Or more conveniently, each has a channel at YouTube and hosts the video reports there. The links are the Times and the Journal.

Fine Tune Your Ears

March 4, 2008

Prof. Rachel Hayes-Harb is a linguistic professor at the University of Utah. She leads the Speech Acquisition Lab that conducts the research on why it’s hard to learn a second language. One possible clue has something to do with sounds. Or rather, the sounds that learners are not even aware of when learning a new language. The Daily Utah Chronicle reports her findings. Here is an excerpt:

“When you learn a language you only learn sounds relevant to that language,” said Zac Rasmussen, a senior in linguistics. “Sounds in the new language are hard to perceive and produce.”

Hayes-Harb said: “You spend your whole life ignoring sounds that aren’t important in your language, and when you learn a new language, you have to pay attention to those sounds.”

The way people hear or don’t hear sounds in a new language may be the reason it is so difficult to learn a new language.

Better fine tune your ears!

You can read the whole article at this link.

The Toastmaster Experience

March 2, 2008

In a previous post, we recommended that you join a Toastmaster International club to improve your spoken English.  A filmmaker and member of Toastmaster, Keva Rosenfeld, shared his Toastmaster experience at NPR. Here is the recording of his talk.