.

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.

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

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.

• The Rose Rotana, Dubai
• 72 storeys
• 333 meters high
• The entire building is to be used exclusively as a hotel. It is scheduled to open later this year and will be the tallest hotel in the world.

• International Commerce Centre, Hong Kong
• 118 storeys
• 484 meters high
• When completed, a hotel will occupy the top 15 floors of the tower. This will be the highest hotel in the world.

Hmmm … this is starting to look like a page from a course book.

The activity is called, “The Baby Gorilla Joke” and in a lame attempt to ecourage book sales, I should refuse to say what the joke is. But that wouldn’t be fair. You can see it here.

I’ve used this activity quite a few times and one thing I’ve learned is how difficult baby gorillas are to draw. I think these artists did a great job. What are their names Burcu?

One day I saw my friendly postman in the street. He was walking away from my front door and I asked him:

“¿Has podido entrar?” (”Did you manage to get in?”)

[Cultural note: In order to get through front doors and have access to buzones (see below), postmen in Barcelona are completely dependent on intercoms and people being at home at delivery time.]

He told me that someone had let him in and so I asked him:

“¿Algo para mi?” (”Anything for me?)

This was intended as a piece of small talk but my postman wanted to give me an answer. He had to think about it for a moment. He looked down at the ground and scratched his forehead. I was just about to tell him that it wasn’t important when he looked up and said:

“¿Coca?” (Cocaine?)

I assumed that I had misheard him but he repeated:

“¿Coca?“

I laughed and passed this off as a joke. Then I left him and went back to my flat. Of course, I checked my buzón to see if it contained any drugs but it didn’t. So I had to conclude that my postman was letting me know that he would be able to supply me with cocaine in case I ever found myself in need. What other possible explanation could there be? Obviously, the ball was in my court as he never mentioned his offer to me again.

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Well all right then, I’ll tell you what the other possible explanation was:

It came a couple of weeks later in the form of a letter which was dropped into my buzón which reminded me that my flat’s previous occupant was called Señor Coca.

I am tempted to say that this was clearly a case of mistaken identity. But the conspiracy theorist in me continues to believe that the whole thing is a cover up: In an attempt to create new business for his cocaine sideline, my shrewd postman is strategically planting these bogus “Señor Coca” letters into people buzones all over the city.

I sometimes wonder how many other individuals across Barcelona live under the false belief that their flats were previously occupied by someone under the name of Coca. And I wonder how many times my postman has fallen back on this ‘innocent misunderstanding’ whenever his blatant attempts to sell drugs have not gone according to plan. Ingenious!

Me (’Creative ideas using images’)

Hans Mols (’Creative ideas for teaching grammar to young learners’)

Ken Wilson (’Creative ideas using drama and improvisation’)

Series editor Alan Maley presented the session

Adrian Tennant takes the mic during a question and answers slot

A soirée to celebrate Alan’s stepping down as series editor followed. Here Alan cuts the cake.

Who would have thought that Ken would end up with the piece of cake with Alan’s head on it? The irony! I tried to persuade him not to eat it but he was like a ravenous animal.