LANGUAGE EXPLORER

More on conversations with native speakers

Today I’d like to tell you more on starting conversations with native speakers when you are travelling to England, or another English speaking country. Also how to make the conversation more friendly.

Places you can safely start conversations in the country where English is spoken:

Hotel reception areas

Train station platforms

Bus stops

Tourist information offices

In shops

Museums/Art Galleries

Taxis

Airport lounges

Hairdressers

Ice cream kiosks

Newspaper stands

Restaurants/cafes

Car boot sales

On the beach

I don’t recommend talking to people in the street, unless it’s just to ask for the time or directions.

Of course, speaking with people you don’t know isn’t the ideal way to practice English, but it is often these places where people who are learning English can have the opportunity to speak it , as they maybe don’t know any native speakers.

So, be careful where you speak and to whom. This is just common sense. If you are a woman alone, then speak to people in public places. It will be surprising that maybe you can start an interesting conversation and get chance to practice.

1. Decide the reason for speaking to somebody. Maybe to find something about a place or just get to know more about what the place is like.
2. Ask a small question to start with “Could you tell me?” or “Do you know where/what time/how etc…?”
3. One the conversation has started, slow down your speech more that you want to, this will give you some time to think more about what you want to say and also give the person you are speaking with the chance to get used to your particular accent.
4. Don’t forget to add “please” or “Thank you” where you need to and also nod your head a bit to show that you understand what the other person is saying.
5. Ask small questions and if they give you a long answer that you can’t remember (for instance, with directions) say “Oh, thanks, let me just write that down please”
6. If they ask about you, be glad to tell them (but not very personal information)
7. Don’t talk about: money, politics, religion unless you get to know the person quite well (say if you are staying in the same hotel for some days)
8. Enjoy the conversation – never worry about mistakes – keep the conversation light-hearted and not too detailed.
9. When the conversations stops, don’t forget to say something like “it was nice talking with you”
10. If you want to take a photo for any reason, don’t forget to ask first if the other person minds.

 

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(www.alanlancs1.podomatic.com)  To see video

Hello everybody, welcome to my language explorer website. And today I thought I’d do a small videocast for you. I’m in my library today and here are my guitars. This is the guitar that I used to play the theme song to my podcasts.

So today I’m going to speak on my new MP3 podcast about stress on words; how we use stress on words to make things more clear for people to understand and place emphasis on certain words. So, I hope you enjoy it and take care, be good be happy and see you next time bye!

 

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Examples of personal barriers

How we personally feel about our progress

Our ability to remember words, phrases, grammar points

Our feelings about how well we pronounce words

What other people tell us about how we learn

Teachers’ comments good or not so good

How much we feel we need to learn a language well

What we think language will give us and what we think it might make harder

Examples of physical barriers

Time or lack of it

Opportunities to speak with other speakers of the language (native speakers in particular)

The place we learn (class or home)

The things we have to provide us with language “input”: courses, books, DVD, MP3, Websites

All these things (and many more I am sure) affect us in how we learn. It may be a positive effect or not.

Some negative effects could be, if we have a bad teacher, this will affect us, if we don’t have enough good learning material, if we don’t have enough time.

Some positive effects could be having a good teacher, praise that makes us feel good, remembering more words that we expect, finding we can pronounce things well.

There are many more things that we can add to this list.

I think our attitude or perhaps a better way of saying it would be our “way of thinking” is very important and can also affect how we learn and perhaps more importantly, how we feel about learning and how much we can get from the language learning experience.

My opinion is that we should think about these things when we feel that we are not making much progress or when we are making good progress, and she what we think may be affecting us in a positive or negative way.

Making a list may help. Once we see something written down we can maybe think about it more and also we then have a record to look back on. Something that tells us how we felt about language at any particular time.

I have started to call myself a “language explorer” rather than a “language student” . To me, this feels more appropriate and right for me. Maybe you prefer the word “student”.

Everyone has to choose his or her own path, although those of you doing courses must follow the way the course is taught.

I like to find my own way whereever I can, however I do study language courses and I would always say that these are important, providing they are good courses and we can learn well from them.

To help us with our attitude to learning and way of thinking about learning, try saying this to yourself.

Instead of “I wish I could know more” say to yourself, “I am glad I have learned so much already”

Instead of “I could do better” say to yourself “Perhaps I can find some new ways to learn”

“Poor language skills” should be “can I improve language skills?”

“pronuciation problems” should be thought of as “what can I do if I am uncertain to best way to say it?”

“not enough time” should be “can I make us of the time I have?”

“no learning fast enough” should be “is there a way I can speed up?”

What I mean is, instead of making statements “my English is poor”, turn it into a question “what can I do to improve?”

This will focus our minds on what to do for the future not dwell on what has gone before

Take care

Be good, be happy

 

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Hello everybody Today I want to talk about a new idea I have had to do some language practice on our own with no more than a piece of paper and a pen. I call this idea “mind word essays”. With this idea, you can practice: Thinking in a language Writing Reading and grammar Speaking/Listening You can do this anywhere, whilst travelling, at home, with friends. I had the idea when I was flying to Germany and I wanted to practice German but I had nothing with me except a pen and paper. The idea is simple and you can do this in any language. I will demonstrate it here using English. You start with a simple sentence: “My friend has a car” – you write it down Next, you quickly think of extra words to make the sentence bigger For example: “My good friend has bought a new car” – you write this down under the first sentence Now, you make another sentence from your head – don’t worry about making mistakes “My good friend from London has bought himself a new red car which he likes very much.” You write this down also Then you make a bigger sentence “My very good friend from London, who I spoke with last week, told me he has bought himself a new red car which he likes very much” 4 sentence are probably enough although you could write more. You can then check the sentences as well as you can for grammar and spelling and then read each sentence out loud and listen to how you say it. So, from four sentences, you have a lot of chance to practice many different language skills. I believe that this will help also improve fluency The important thing is to think of it like a game and enjoy it, getting the words from your head as youy can. This will make you think more clearly in the language and help you to think of the words you need when you have conversations with people. Enjoy your mind essays, you can keep them and look at them again a few weeks later and try the same sentences again to see if you can think of words more quickly than before. Be good, be happy Bye for now

 

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Hello everybody Today I want to talk about a new idea I have had to do some language practice on our own with no more than a piece of paper and a pen. I call this idea “mind word essays”. With this idea, you can practice: Thinking in a language Writing Reading and grammar Speaking/Listening You can do this anywhere, whilst travelling, at home, with friends. I had the idea when I was flying to Germany and I wanted to practice German but I had nothing with me except a pen and paper. The idea is simple and you can do this in any language. I will demonstrate it here using English. You start with a simple sentence: “My friend has a car” – you write it down Next, you quickly think of extra words to make the sentence bigger For example: “My good friend has bought a new car” – you write this down under the first sentence Now, you make another sentence from your head – don’t worry about making mistakes “My good friend from London has bought himself a new red car which he likes very much.” You write this down also Then you make a bigger sentence “My very good friend from London, who I spoke with last week, told me he has bought himself a new red car which he likes very much” 4 sentence are probably enough although you could write more. You can then check the sentences as well as you can for grammar and spelling and then read each sentence out loud and listen to how you say it. So, from four sentences, you have a lot of chance to practice many different language skills. I believe that this will help also improve fluency The important thing is to think of it like a game and enjoy it, getting the words from your head as youy can. This will make you think more clearly in the language and help you to think of the words you need when you have conversations with people. Enjoy your mind essays, you can keep them and look at them again a few weeks later and try the same sentences again to see if you can think of words more quickly than before. Be good, be happy Bye for now

 

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Hello everybody. Thank you very much for visiting my new website!  I have my own website and I have chosen “Language Explorer” as the name.  I am a native English speaker and I learn French, German, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.

Are you also a “Language explorer”? Well, if you are, then this may be the website you.

My hobby is language learning and I like to share my ideas and experiences.

Maybe in time, we can have a “Language Explorer Community”  of people who are also interested in language and making life fun through developing language skills.

I am making this site for:

• People like you who are interested in improving foreign language speaking, listening, reading and writing.
• People like you who like a relaxing and interesting website where they are always welcome
• People like you who enjoy listening to some relaxing music
• People like you who want to share ideas and get to know people and culture from around the world.

I will be telling you about life in England and also some of the culture and history of my country.

My “Google Earth” reference is: Lancashire, England

I will put some “videocasts” on my site sometimes

I am always interested in your ideas and feedback. Please leave messages if you want to and I will try to answer you as soon as I can. I really want my website to be interesting to everybody who visits.

Thank you for visiting and “watch this space” for new things…..

You can still visit my other websites which I will keep going for some time yet:

www.alanlancs1.podomatic.com (my first website for everyone who enjoys languages)

www.alanpalmer.podomatic.com (for chinese friends)

Be good, be happy!

Your friendly Language Explorer

Alan

Dragon Boat Racing from roflman79 on Vimeo.

Here is a video of the Dragon Boat Race that my son and I took part in yesterday.

I hope you find it interesting. A bit of Chinese Culture in England.

My commentary on the video is: Alan here. We are at Hollingworth (I made a mistake and said “Hollingsworth”) Lake where today we’re going to have Dragon Boat Racing. Perhaps not the same as in China but the boats will look very similar and we’ll see what we can do.

The company I work for has a boat (on hire) and we will be racing very soon. We hope we can win, but at the moment we don’t know - so we’ll see…

So enjoy the next part of the video which will be the dragon boat race….”

Bye for now

Alan

Hello everybody

Sorry it has been a long time since my last podcast. I’ve been busy lately so I haven’t had time to make one. Today’s podcast is a bit scientific as I have just been reading a book I was given on linguistics. In this book it mentioned the work of Dr Stephen D. Krashen. http://www.sdkrashen.com/ and I have become very interested now in his work.

What is interesting for me is that Dr Krashen has published his ideas in 1981 on language acquisition and learning and I did not know that some of my ideas are similar to the language learning theories he has written about.

In Linguistics, “acquisition” means “the act or process of achieving mastery of a language or a linguistic rule or element”:

We talk of “child language acquisition” and “second language acquisition” for adults.

The interesting ideas he has written about can be read on the website http://www.sdkrashen.com/SL_Acquisition_and_Learning/index.html

What was interesting for me was that Dr Krashen talks about language acquisition and language learning as being different.

When I see some of the ideas of successful language acquisition and learning, I can see the way I have been learning French over the last 17 years, German over the last 7 years and more recently Chinese and Spanish.

In my case, I had been forming my ideas independently, as I have never heard of Stephen Krashen until yesterday.

Here are some of the things that make for a successful language acquisition and learning student.

Some characteristics
 good students pay attention to form
 they monitor their own and others’ speech
 they are prepared to guess
 they always attempt to communicate, to get their message across
 they are willing to appear foolish
 they look for practice – initiating conversations
 they attend to meaning – by attending to context

Important strategies
 clarification/verification of language
 monitoring progress
 memorization words and phrases
 guessing the meaning
 deductive reasoning from situations
 practice-learning on their own

I hope you found this podcast interesting. I am on holiday in Germany for a week, so I will make a podcast in a week’s time. See you soon – bye

PS. Here is an interesting blog I found:
http://languageinstinct.blogspot.com/2006/10/oral-and-aural-skills.html

 

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Hello everyone, good evening.
Alan here from England, and this time I’m speaking without a text again. It’s always interesting for me to just speak without a text, because this is how we speak normally when we speak with friends or with, mm, people we know or work with, and sometimes with my podcast I like to do this because it makes it more natural.

When you’re speaking with a text, it’s not quite the same as when you’re speaking just from your head, if you like, speaking aloud, as you would when you’re speaking with friends and family. And of course it means that you can hear when I pause, when I think about things a little more, and then when I decide to say something. And for those of you who are learning English, I think this makes it more interesting - maybe more difficult to understand, but also mmm, you can hear when I stop a bit, then start again. And that is how conversations go.

When someone reads from a text we just follow the words on the paper, or on the computer screen of course. But when you’re speaking normally, you’re thinking of the words in your head and then you say them. And of course this cannot be continuous, it has to have some small stops and starts, and this I think demonstrates that it’s useful when, mmm, people are learning English and they can hear that a native speaker would also sometimes stop and think about what they are saying before they say something more.

And I have people asking me quite often, how can they understand native speakers better? For instance, they may watch the news to TV or listen to the radio and the speakers are very fast when they speak and they don’t always things, …, the words are sometimes complicated. And I say to myself, well, you know, when we watch TV, watch the news, all the words are prepared before, They need to get as much information in as short a time possible and so they choose the words carefully and they say them rather fast.

And I think this isn’t a very good way for people learning English to improve their English.

Of course the can hear new words and things, but it may be a little off-putting to hear someone speaking very fast on TV.

Other people has said to me that I don’t speak as fast (here) as I do normally because they are used to hearing teachers, maybe, speaking very fast. But I say, not all English speakers, native speakers, speak quickly. Some people speak a little slower. And I don’t think that my “normal” speed is very slow but do not think it is very fast either.

So my advice to those of you who are listening to me speaking and wanting to improve your comprehension, your understanding, I say listen to this podcast a few times and listen to when I make my small pauses and when I start speaking again .

And you can see very easily when I think about what I am saying and when I decide to say something that I’ve thought about.

So I hope this podcast has been interesting for you – it’s just me speaking, talking, chatting without a text. See you next time, excuse-me, bye for now

 

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I hope you like my guitar piece which I played this evening and a nice sunny evening in England

 

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