Sunday, November 9, 2008

A matter of pronunciation

When dealing with pronunciation, students quite often say that it doesn´t make any difference if they pronounce the word correctly or not. Well, show them this video and perhaps they will be convinced: sinking or thinking?

3 comments:

Barry Cradshaw said...

Of course this is true. Pronunciation is one of the most important aspects in speaking a language. I've always thought it and I've always tried to improve my pronunciation in order to get a better level of English. And I'll tell you one thing. It works.

Nice video. Quite weird though.

PD: This is Francisco Manuel Rivera Callado

Unknown said...

This joke has been very funny for me since I know here a French girl who pronounce the English th at the same way that the German boy does. At the beginning I didn't understand her but know I always know what she is saying. We have to be a little bit understanding since we will make another pronunciation mistakes.

Cheers!

Elias

Emma said...

Hi! Pronunciation is always a tender point with my students. I don't know about your Spanish students but my French ones are very self conscious about their accent and often won't speak up because of it (might explain why French are perceived as rude when tourists ask them for directions). I always start the year by telling them that they are not expected to have a British or American accent, that there are many wonderful accents and I show them 2 videos (the 2nd one has a lot of fowl language but he is extremely talented so I tend to show it after warning my students about it) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UgpfSp2t6k and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dABo_DCIdpM . I hope you enjoy them!