Typing Phonetic Symbols

Music, Phonetics, ,

It’s six o’clock in the morning and already awake. Bugger! Today is the day I don’t have to teach first period but my mind doesn’t seem to know and has already decided it’s time I get down to some serious work so I’ve decided to turn on my computer and listen to the amazing voice of this guy ,James Arthur , apparently the winner of the XFaxtor. I am not a follower of this programme but the truth be told I think he’s got that kind of voice I could fall in love with and, to top it all, I have just heard his version of the song “I’m sexy and I Know it” originally sung by Lmfao and I can’t hardly believe it’s the same song. Well, I just wanted you to know.

Anyway, I wanted to share with you this tool that can come quite handy when working with phonetics .You can find it in a blog called Random Idea English, which is worth a visit. Here’s what it looks like ; you just need to type and copy/paste. Here’s the link .Easy peasy!

Here’s the song and the guy I was telling you about. By the way, he is also the one singing the latest hit “Impossible”

Words in a song: by one’s side

Words in a song

This is the third cropped song of the series “Words in a song”. If you want to see the Whys and the Hows of this exercise , follow this link to the first song in this series.

This time I’ve chosen the song Mirror by Lil Wayne Ft. Bruno Mars and the highlighted expression is ” by your side“.

Steps :

♥Orally , introduce the word you want students to learn, giving examples and asking them to infer the meaning.

♥Choose a song that contains the word or words you want to teach

♥Crop the video with tubechop; you don’t want to play the whole video.

♥ Students listen to the cropped video and identify when, in the song, the highlighted word(s) has been used.

♥ Second time: students do a fill- in- the- gaps exercise or any other king of exercise that takes my fancy.

♥ Third time: students sing along

♥ HOMEWORK: Now, very important, students need to go home and write a sentence containing the highlighted word(s) . Ask for vonlunteers to translate the cropped song .

Here’s the cropped version and the corresponding lyrics with my proposal for blanks.

LIES,WHY,CORRECT, FRIEND, MIRROR,NOBODY, UNDERSTAND,WINDOW

[Bruno Mars]
_____ on the wall, here we are again
Through my rise and fall
You’ve been my only _____
You told me that they can ______ the man I am
So _____ are we here talkin’ to each other again

[Lil Wayne]
Oh, I see the truth in your _____
I see _______ by your side
but I’m with you when you ‘re all alone
And you ______ me when I’m lookin wrong
I see that guilt beneath the shame
I see your soul through your ______ pain
I see the scars that remain
I see you Wayne, Im lookin at the..

When I Grow Up

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“When I grow up I’m going to be a flight attendant” I used to tell my parents when I was in primary school. That was really my dream!  I used to dream of going to far away countries, meeting amazing people and learning to speak different languages. I dreamed of holidaying in Indonesia and swimming in the Pacific Ocean … but my parents never liked it and very soon tried to put me off the idea by telling me flight attendants were just waitresses in a plane, but still… I dreamed!

Even now, if someone should ask me  if I ever wanted to be a teacher, my brain automatically associates ” wanting to be” with “being a flight attendant”. For better or for worse, I’ve got a friend who is a flight attendant and when she tells us about her travels I always turn green with envy. I cannot help it but that’s called rubbing salt into wounds, isn’t it?

Anyway, this is the question I asked my students and these were their answers. I thought it could be fun to take their picture now so that, in the future, they can look back and see if their dreams came true.I hope so!

Created with http://slideful.com/

Having Fun

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I should be marking exams and then again preparing a new batch of them.Oh my Gosh It is that time of the year!!Instead I am playing with Classtools.net.

One of my students asked me to do some more practise on Reported Speech Questions and I thought this could be a nice way to revise this point of grammar.

Click on the numbers to see the questions ! Don’t you just love it??