Collections of Professor Dr David Ngin Sian Pau

8.     Just think how cool it would have been if they had a Ustream channel where we could text-in
       ways Moe could mutilate the terrorists.
9.    Guess how it would have been if my first film was a mafia drama?
10. His income for life would be thereby increased beyond what it would have been if the timber
       had not been cut.
11. It is very likely that the economy will still be stronger than it would have been if we had
      regulated credit markets more strictly from the start.
12. How very desolate it would have been if we had nothad one another.

I think it’s good to decide on the approach I intend to use for teaching a new grammatical structure. The approach I choose will also largely determine the activities I will use. Deductive methods involve writing out grammatical concepts and rules and explaining them. Inductive methods encourage students to come up with the rule on their own after seeing sentences with the targeted grammatical structure. Learning grammatical structures inductively also facilitates the stage of producing language. But it needs to spend a lot of time exposing students to the structure.

Multiple choice type questions also allow students to simply recognize the forms without having to conjugate any verbs or produce sentences using the new grammatical concepts. After engaging students in practice, I will encourage the students to notice grammatical patterns. Recognizing grammatical patterns is an important stage of practicing grammatical concepts. For this area of practice, I will present the new grammatical form on a flashcard and ask them 'Yes' and 'No' questions. The final step of practice is to provide enough guided practice so that students feel comfortable producing and semi-producing the structures on their own.

Pronunciation

Pronunciation is the ability to say words properly with the correct sounds in the correct places. There are some keys to proper pronunciation 1) being able to read phonetic symbols and know well how to pronounce a word as exactly as in the dictionary 2) listening to the audio record of English wording sounds in some dictionaries online 3) learning which syllable to stress in a word 4) following the instruction of an excellent non-native English speakers (not native) on pronunciation (at this point, native speakers in general don’t know how to instruct students because they’ve never been learners of pronunciation. They’re born and brought up in native English speaking countries where they’ve never been taught or learnt pronunciation because it’s not necessary for them unless their specialization of study or research is teaching English, TESOL, TEFL, or English Language. I will, however, ask students to practically do the lessons that target specific trouble areas can make a huge difference in a student's ability to deal with issues in pronunciation. In my class, students will practice the following items as they are necessary.

1. Teaching all phonetic symbols and their correct sounds
2. Giving lessons to practically write at least twenty vocabulary in every class with phonetic
    symbols and pronounce them correctly in the classroom
3. working on specific vowels
4. using “a” or “an” and pronouncing “the” before vowels and consonants and some exceptions
5. working on trouble consonants (e.g. th & t, sh & s, v & w, etc.. sound)
6. linked sound techniques (e.g. What’s up? = Whasap?, out of it = outdoveit, etc..)
7. working on understanding movement and location of mouth and tongue when making sounds

Enunciation is speaking clearly - perhaps better understood by its opposite which is mumbling or slurring words. Enunciation is a very important aspect of speaking and poor enunciation can make someone almost impossible to understand. As far as my experience is concern, little improvements in enunciation come from exposure to native speaker especially for advance level student (not effective for lower level English learners), and plenty of natural practice. Of course, focused work targeting problem areas can help a great deal as well. It’s not necessary to have just native English speaker who doesn’t have the knowledge of teaching English to teach English pronunciation. But