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Monday, June 6, 2011

Transferring skills from classroom to everyday

You may be a very diligent student and practise regularly and know what all your pronunciation problems are - speaking too quickly, r/l confusion, misplaced word stress, upward rising intonation at the end of every sentence. However, you still revert back to the same old problems when you are at a meeting, or chatting with friends.

How do you make that change? I ask my students to 'be in the moment' for 5 minutes every day and focus on one aspect of their pronunciation, be it 'th', chunking and pausing, intonation and focus with full concentration on their speech for just five minutes. Little by little it will change.