Monday 30 January 2012

Learn English/Sustaining a conversation

While doing conversation tasks with my beginner students, I have experienced some awkward moments when the person supposed to speak pauses abruptly and a deafening silence falls down.
I think everybody has experienced this and many times my students have told me: “I cannot find my words.”

Typically for beginners, the difficulty is that their words in a speech usually come in their native languages. For my Romanian students this is a disaster because the way we, Romanians, speak is almost all the time in contradiction with the English word order.
Another thing that compelled me to write this piece is that students find themselves very often in the situation in which they have to express opinions and answer to questions and I am not there to help them.

A few tips: in case of a conversation with a native speaker, always listen carefully to what he says. If he asks you a question, follow the tense he uses and respond with a sentence in which you use the same tense. Use very simple sentences. Do not imagine a complicated sentence in Romanian and then try to translate it in English. It is time consuming and while doing so you may end up talking to yourself.

More tips will be found in a future article.
I will start a conversation module for the beginner-elementary level students at the end of March.

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