Comments on: Guest Post: Support for Oral Communication within the ESL Curriculum at Baruch College

By: Elisabeth Gareis

Elisabeth Gareis — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:44:23 +0000

Thank you, Yuriko. Final consonants are indeed a major issue. Some of the programs in the new lab have whole “chapters” devoted to final consonants, including <-ed> and <-s>. The book/tape programs “Accurate English” is a good examples, as well as the software programs “Accent Master” and “DynEd Courseware”. Especially that later program is excellent, as it is educational and entertaining. For example, the program features a listening bingo game where students hear a word and then search for it among many similar words on an online bingo game board. Then, of course, the program has sections where students can listen to prompts, repeat them, and then compare their own recordings with the prompt. When students sign on to the program, they can enter their native language, and the program recommends sound and intonation features that are likely beneficial for the students. Final <-ed> and <-s> exercises are recommended for lots of native languages, by the way.

By: Yukiko

Yukiko — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:02:36 +0000

Thank you very much for posting. Some of the students I worked with last semester did inquire me of available ESL support services within Baruch, and they would very much appreciate this information.I would like to mention another speech pattern that I encountered with some of my students in their oral English that stood out to me as rather distinct, which is that for some students, they do not pronounce words ‘to the end’ in English. For example, they tend to forget or omit to pronounce the inflectional endings of verbs ‘play, play, played’ or plural nouns ‘pen, pens; book, books’. This may be because of the grammar of their first language (e.g. Japanese does not have inflections for plurals) or because of the sound pattern of their first language (e.g. their language does not have words ending in a consonant). Sometimes it is a bit hard to ‘fix’ them because in their own community they may speak English that way, but when they actually try to improve on this, their English sounds more ‘natural’.