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Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Listening to Australia

Photo: Listening to Australia 4 (Advanced) written by yours truly and Pornswan Braun is a great resource to train the ear to listen to fast authentic Aussie speech
My favourite scenarios are the women gossiping at work and the male version gossiping (yes men gossip) at the pub. They were both authentic conversations.

Listening to Australia 4 (Advanced) written by yours truly and Pornswan Braun is a great resource to train the ear to listen to fast authentic Aussie speech

My favourite scenarios are the women gossiping at work and the male version gossiping (yes men gossip) at the pub. They were both authentic conversations.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Transcriptions

For advanced students or those of you who feel your English is pretty good but you just need a little bit of 'touching up'. transcribing a recording, exactly word for word, mistake for mistake is a very good way of finding out what type of grammar and pronunciation errors you are making.
It goes without saying that you must be exact in your transcriptions otherwise the exercise is useless.

  1. Record yourself or your student talking about their research or a project at work.
  2.  Listen bit by bit and transcribe exactly how it is spoken. 
  3. Listen again 2 or three times to make sure you have everything exact.
  4. Go through together and do an error analysis and offer suggestions or invite the student to correct.
  5. Write out the passage corrrectly and the student or you read and record again
The following text is writtten word for word with pronunciation errors as well.

We mainly focussed on za development of catalysts to biofue generation and sometimes we also to design new catalysts for za green chemical process such as za fine chemical generation, petrol chemical process and sometimes pharmaceutical generation.

We are mainly focussed on the development of catalysts to biofuel generation and sometimes we also to design new catalysts for the green chemical process such as za fine chemical generation, petrol chemical process and sometimes pharmaceutical generation. (Intonation corrections were also noted such as rising for listing two or three items.)