I was happy to hear from Guido, a teacher working in Seville. He said that he liked the idea of using images of book covers from Amazon to create classroom activities. He made this YouTube clip for his students:

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So what are the missing words?

• …..   …………… that I had duck feet
• …..   …………… I could hold your hand
• …..   …………… I could dine with a porcupine
• …..   …………… I were a dog
• …..   …………… my brother was a dog
• …..   …………… I didn’t have to sleep
• …..   …………… I was the person I’m pretending to be
• …..   …………… you weren’t my mummy
• …..   …………… Daddy didn’t drink so much

Perhaps after identifying the missing words (”I wish”), students could be asked to reconstruct the auxiliaries/verbs which follow them:

• I wish that I ………. duck feet
• I wish I ………. hold your hand
• I wish I ………. dine with a porcupine
• I wish I ………. a dog
• I wish my brother ………. a dog
• I wish I ………. have to sleep
• I wish I ………. the person I’m pretending to be
• I wish you ………. my mummy
• I wish Daddy ………. drink so much

To see more about the potential of Amazon, click here.

This is the title of a guest posting I have written for Lindsay Clandfield’s famous blog, “Six Things: A collection of miscellany from the world of English Language Teaching.” You can read the posting here.

“A sculpin is any of a family of spiny, large-headed, broad-mouthed, often scaleless bony fishes.”

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5 things that trainee teachers are often taught about the schwa:

1. The schwa is the most common vowel sound in English (actually very questionable if we are considering the huge number of non-native English speakers in the world)
2. The sound is very short and weak. It is sometimes described as neutral and colourless.
3. It can be represented by any vowel letter (a, e, i, o or u): Vegan, kitten, basin, button, Cajun. It can also be represented by many different vowel letter combinations: Britain, cushion, etc.
4. The schwa is by definition an unstressed sound. In other words, it can only fall on weak syllables. Notice that in all of the example words above, the second syllable is weak.
5. It is represented by the symbol /ə/

• Vegan: /ˈviːɡən/
• Kitten: /ˈkɪtən/
• Basin: /ˈbeɪsən/
• Button: /ˈbʌtən/
• Cajun: /ˈkeɪdʒən/
• Britain: /ˈbrɪtən/
• Cushion: /ˈkʊʃən/

English teachers and English learners aren’t the only ones whose lives are made difficult by this troublesome little sound. Watch 14-year old Trevor Mahoney competing in the 2002 Scripps Spelling Bee competition: Click <here> to watch the clip and pay attention from 1 minute 30 seconds.

Poor Trevor doesn’t know if he is dealing with a schwa (/skʌlpən/) or with the fish and chips vowel (/skʌlpɪn/). This is understandable. When we are dealing with isolated words (i.e. not connected speech), these two sounds can appear very similar:

• Basin: /ˈbeɪsən/ (schwa)
  
• Robin: /ˈrɒbɪn/ (fish and chips)

• Britain: /ˈbrɪtən/ (schwa)
  
• Mountain: /ˈmaʊntɪn/ (fish and chips)
  

• Woman: /ˈwʊmən/ (schwa)
  
• Women: /ˈwɪmɪn/ (fish and chips)

Personally, I love phonetics and I really enjoyed finding out about the schwa during my teacher training course 8 years ago. But I am a bit of a freak. I can remember that the other traininees on the course hated it. In fact, to them, the schwa became a bit of a joke. Since then, I have often noticed the same attitude among my own trainee teachers.

More importantly, I can honestly put my hand on my heart and say that I have never managed to enlighten a single student of English by introducing him or her to this area of phonetics. On the contrary, I can remember situations in which an introduction to the schwa has resulted in damaged student confidence. Even my Catalan students, who have a similar sound in their language, have been unenthusiastic, to say the least.

In the past, I have introduced the schwa to students in an attempt to improve their listening skills. In other words, I have made it clear that I don’t expect them to produce the schwa sound when they are speaking. But my students have been unenthusiastic about this approach. There is a mentality among language learners that says: “We want to speak like native English speakers.” This is of course unrealistic in most cases. But then so are most other dreams in life.

So my thought for the day is this:

For those of us who like to take an active approach to pronunciation training with our English learners, why bother introducing them to the schwa? If learners pronunciation of words such as vegan, kitten, button, Cajun, Britain or Cushion, is heavily influenced by the vowel letters in the unstressed syllables, keep them right with the ‘fish and chip’ vowel sound.

In other words, although the dictionary says this:

• Vegan: /ˈviːɡən/
• Kitten: /ˈkɪtən/
• Basin: /ˈbeɪsən/
• Button: /ˈbʌtən/
• Cajun: /ˈkeɪdʒən/
• Britain: /ˈbrɪtən/
• Cushion: /ˈkʊʃən/

You drill this:

• Vegan: /ˈviːɡɪn/
• Kitten: /ˈkɪtɪn/
• Basin: /ˈbeɪsɪn/
• Button: /ˈbʌtɪn/
• Cajun: /ˈkeɪdʒɪn/
• Britain: /ˈbrɪtɪn/
• Cushion: /ˈkʊʃɪn/

I’ll be very surprised if anyone takes any notice of this posting. I asked a couple of teacher friends about their attitudes to the schwa. Their reaction - to roll their eyes and change the subject.

This is the title of a guest posting that I have written for the Macmillan Dictionary blog (link given below). In the posting, I look at the theory behind a YouTube clip that I made a few months ago:

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You can read the posting here.

I found a site that allows you to download high resolution images of the Mr Men book covers (click here for link). Here are twelve.

Q: What do they have in common?

A: Their names all consist of 2-syllable adjectives.

A lesson plan that uses these images can be downloaded on pdf below.

  mr-men-book-covers.pdf

Just wanted to share a few good image sites that I’ve come across during my online wanderings.

1.  The Life photo archive

Last year, as part of a joint effort with Life, Google began hosting an archive of the magazine’s photographs, most of which were never published. As is the case with the magazine, there is a strong emphasis on photojournalism.

Wide range of facial expressions on children at puppet show - The moment the dragon is slain, Guignol puppet show, Parc de Montsouris, Paris, 1963 Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt

2.  Worth1000

This is what is commonly known as an “image manipulation contest website”. Users or participants are invited to upload photographs which they have altered in some way or another using an application such as Photoshop. Contests are themed and organized in galleries such as:

• If dogs ruled the world
• Celebrity day jobs
• Literalisms

The result is a huge bank of very creative and mentally stimulating images which are perfect for a whole range of speaking or writing activities.

(From If dogs ruled the world)

(’Holy Cow’ from Literalisms)

3. The Museum of Bad Art

This is a great site. Full of tasteless gems such as Lucy in the field with flowers.

4. Amazon.co.uk

This is my all time favourite. I made a YouTube clip a while back to demonstrate its potential:

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5. Simon Høgsberg’ site

This photographer makes clever use of his website to exhibit his work. One piece titled “We’re all gonna die - 100 meters of existence” allows the user to scroll horizontally along a frieze of 178 people who were photographed over 20 days on a Berlin railroad bridge.

Other projects include Faces of New York (10 New Yorkers talk about their interesting faces) and The Thought Project which explores the thoughts we have when we walk alone in the street.

This site came to me via Nik Peachey’s Quick Shout blog.

6. London International Awards

This organization was set up to award exceptional creative work in advertising and design. It is really worthwhile looking through the 2007 and 2008 finalists, especially in the Poster & Billboard and Print categories. There are a lot of thought-provoking campaigns which might inspire teaching ideas

Advert for Funk Sunglasss. Caption reads: No one needs to know what you did last night. Now look carefully at the blood vessels coming out of the eye.

One of a series of campaign images for Amnesty International. The logo sits like an annoying fly on the noses of world leaders who have demonstrated dubious human rights standards.