Kathleen’s Pre-Intermediate class have been taking advantage of the autumn sunshine this morning – everyone looks very relaxed and at ease, except maybe Bob 🙂

NEW! Lisa’s weekly tips provide answers to the most common student questions.

THIS WEEK – How can I find suitable reading material?

In the past, my students have often said to me, “I want to read English books/magazines/newspapers but I can’t understand everything? What can I use to practise reading outside of class?”
The answer in my experience is simple. Understand that there are two type of material: 1. Authentic material written for native speakers and 2. Adapted material written for language learners. You can read both of these at any level of English as long as you understand the difference between the two.

1. Reading Authentic Material
Yes, you can and should try to read authentic material. This includes newspapers, magazines, websites, menus, books, information leaflets, advertising information, cereal packets – basically anything and everything. The trick is to simply try to understand the main ideas while accepting that you won’t understand everything. When you meet unknown vocab, ignore it. Don’t look up every new word in your dictionary. Trust me, if it’s a word you need to know you’ll keep meeting it again and again and will soon understand its meaning anyway.

Reading authentic material is a great way to build your vocabulary and increase your accuracy, so don’t make it a chore. It’s better to read lightly and often than to spend all day on one article making a note of every new word in your notebook.

2. Reading Adapted Material
Of course, sometimes, it’s nice to be able to understand everything. This is when you need adapted material. The readings in your student books, for example, are changed to suit your level. At the school we also have “Readers”. These are classic books such as “Pride and Prejudice” or “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” which have been adapted to suit different levels of English. Go to GIL (Room 1 2-3pm) if you want to borrow one to take home and read. In addition, the internet is a great source of adapted material. Try http://iteslj.org/links/ESL/Reading/ for a long list of links.

The most important thing is to keep reading. If you think about how you learnt your mother tongue, you probably met a lot of new words through reading. Reading is also an excellent way to get used to English grammatical structures and collocations.

So to summarise this week’s Tip – Try to read a variety of authentic and adapted reading material and relax and enjoy it rather than struggling to understand every word.

NEW! Lisa’s weekly tips provide answers to the most common student questions.

THIS WEEK – How can I understand native speakers?
In the past, my students have often said to me, “I can understand you and my classmates, but when I’m outside school and I speak to a native speaker I don’t understand anything. Why is this?”
The answer, in my experience, is simple. It’s not about vocabulary or grammar or even listening. It’s usually because of pronunciation. In particular, a feature of pronunciation called connected speech.

Think about the following sentence:

I’ve got apples and oranges.

You would probably say (and expect to hear):
I . have . got . apples . and . oranges.

A native speaker, however, would say:
I’ve gotapplesanoranges.

There are three features of connected speech happening here: contractions, linking and elision.

1. Contractions
Most of you know about (but don’t always use) contractions. A contraction is a shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word group, created by taking out a letter (sound) in the middle. So, “do not” become “don’t”, “I am” becomes “I’m” and in the above sample sentence “I have” becomes “I’ve” /aiv/. Many students seem shy of using contractions when they speak, but what you must remember is native speakers ALWAYS use contractions in spoken English. Therefore, you need to get used to recognising them.

2. Linking
Linking is a way of joining the pronunciation of two words so that they are easy to say and flow together smoothly. In the above example we can see consonant to vowel linking. This is when the final consonant sound of the first word rolls into the vowel sound beginning of the second word. So in the sample sentence above “apples” sounds like “tapples”, and “oranges” sounds sounds like “doranges” (or more often “noranges”. See #3 Elision below.)

3. Elision
Elision is when you don’t pronounce one or more sounds in a word or phrase, so that it is easier for the speaker to say. You probably all know the examples of “wanna” instead of “want to” and “gonna” instead of “going to”. In the above example sentence, we can see what often happens to “and” between two words of equal value; it becomes very weak and the /d/ sound isn’t pronounced at all. So fish and chips becomes fish ‘n’ chips and black and white becomes black ‘n’ white.

As a student of English you may feel strange using connected speech and it’s not vital that you do because you can still be understood. However, you do need to be able to recognise it when native speakers use it.

So to summarise this week’s Tip – If you find it difficult to understand native speakers ask at GIL for some practice exercise you can do with connected speech and hopefully you’ll see your listening skills improve.