• Short, High-Interest Articles for Extensive Reading: # 12: The Scariest Sound To Wild Animals: People Not Lions

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(This posting includes a handout LINK AT THE END OF THIS POST which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

The video shows a leopard chasing and then catching a gazelle. The leopard then starts to drag the body next to a small pond. Just as it starts to eat, it hears a man’s soft voice talking about a book he had just read. The leopard stops eating, looks to the area that the voice came from for a moment, then jumps up and runs away, leaving its dinner behind.

The man’s voice was a recording playing from a speaker set up near the pond. Researchers had put the device there as part of their study to learn how scary human sounds were to wild animals compared to other sounds. (See complete article below.)

For background information about these articles and for suggestions for how to use them with your students, see  • Introducing “Short, High-Interest Readings”  Also, I’ll be adding more of these articles in the right-hand column: ESL Reading> Short, High Interest Articles for Extensive Readings

Here is the eleventh article. You can download the article for your students by clicking on the link at the end. Also included are three optional exercises: True-False Questions; Paraphrasing Exercise; Reflection Exercise.

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• Teach Reduced Forms for Comprehension Not for Speaking (Revisited)

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Cover reduced forms shot

*(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)

Here is a link to a short video about this posting: Teach Reduced Forms for Comprehension NOT Speaking

A student, Tim, once came to my class all excited and asked me, “Hey David, wha ya gonna do di wee-en? I wanna gedouda taw.” 

I was pretty sure that he was trying to say something in English, but I had no idea what it was. After repeating the sentences several times, he became embarrassed and decided to write them down. “What are you going to do this weekend? I want to get out of town.”

He told me that the teacher in his previous class was doing lessons on reduced forms of speaking and had encouraged them to use them when speaking. So this student whose pronunciation was often hard to understand because he tended to drop final consonants of words (e.g. wee = week / taw = town) was being encouraged to do something that would make him even harder to understand.  Crazy!

How to work with reduced forms. (Handout exercise included)

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• ESL Teachers See The World Differently

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I’ve experienced envy. I’ve witnessed my friend pick up a sheet of music and soon begin nodding his head in rhythm with what he saw on the page. Similarly, I’ve seen my wife stifle tears as she watched scenes of horses competing in show jumping. Also, I once happened to be riding on a country road in my uncle’s pick-up truck driving from his farm to town and noticed him slowing down to stare out at neighbors’ fields of corn.

They were all looking at the same thing as I was, but what they saw was a world that I couldn’t imagine. And I was sure that this ability of theirs was enriching their lives. Why couldn’t I have something similar in my life?

Then one day at school, I discovered that I actually did have something but just never realized it.

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• Missing WHO and WHICH/THAT: Common ESL Problem and Solution (Revisited)

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Cover missing who Shot

*(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)

Sometimes I get the feeling that some of my ESL students (including advanced ones) believe that there are a limited number of “who” and “which” out there, and they are afraid of using them all up before they die.

The problem happens when students are trying to write more advanced styles with a dependent and independent clause in a sentence.

Some examples:

Mistake: The people are walking their dogs should keep them on a leash.
Correction: The people WHO are walking their dogs should keep them on a leash.

Mistake: I try to give money to scholarships help low-income students.
Correction: I try to give money to scholarships WHICH help low-income students. *

I’ve also notice that this mistake often happens when students start a sentence with “there”.

Mistake: There was an accident happened near my house.
Correction: There was an accident WHICH happened near my house. * 

* We could substitute the word THAT for WHICH in these sentences.

Solution: Helping students with this. (Handout included.)

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