Sound...NOT Spelling!

When students learn English pronunciation, it's sometimes hard for them to understand that sometimes there's no direct relationship between the way you pronounce a word and the way you spell it. This joke, which is currently circulating around Facebook, illustrates that problem perfectly: sometimes, it's easier to think of the sounds you need to create a word, rather than the letters.

Some doctor on TV this morning said that the way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you have started. So I looked around my house to see things I'd started and hadn't finished.
Then...I finished off a bottle of Vodka, a botle of Baileys, a bodle of wum, a pock of Prungles, an a boc a choclez. Yu haf no idr how bludy fablus I feeel now.
Plaese sned dhis orn to dem yu fee ar in ned ov iennr pisss lol lol

Cheers! Happy Friday, and if you drink, don't type.

Word of the Year!

Well, English may not have anything like a Royal Academy, but it does seem to have a LOT of popularity contests. Dictionary.com has published its choice for Word of the Year:

http://hotword.dictionary.com/woty/?t

Another Stop Spanglish classic...

This one was taken in the Puerta del Sol, in Madrid.

Poor tourists...

FREE!! ESL Writing Checklist

In the time that I've been teaching English, both in Spain and in other countries, I've found that almost all of my students hate writing. It's easy to understand why. Effective writing (not just spelling, but constructing arguments and convincing people) isn't easy to do. Students also don't like to spend lots of time trying to write something that sounds intelligent...and then get a paper back that's full of mistakes.

One of the best ways you can avoid the disappointment of getting a (heavily) corrected essay back is to check for mistakes before you submit your text to your teacher. Many (if not almost all) mistakes are easily avoidable, and if you go back and look at the kind of corrections your teacher made on your essays, you'll probably find that you're not making a lot of different kinds of mistakes...you're making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

If this is the case, here's a downloadable writing checklist that can help you revise your writing before you submit it.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/35772510/Writing-Checklist

This isn't a list of every possible thing that students do wrong, but it does cover the most common (and the most easily prevented) mistakes that teachers tend to see. If you're writing the First Certificate exam, these are the kinds of silly mistakes that make students lose points and risk failing.

Spelling as Sport!

One of the peculiarities of spelling words in English is that, many times, there's no direct correlation between an individual letter - the letter "A", say - and the sound it represents. There are a lot of historical reasons for this (most of them too complicated to talk about here), but it has created a uniquely American pastime: the spelling bee.

A spelling bee is a competition, usually for children, where a group of kids are given words to spell. The children start out with easy words, but as the competition progresses, the words become more difficult, and each time a student spells a word incorrectly, he or she is eliminated. The winner is the person who, basically, can spell more words than any other competitor.

In the United States, the biggest and most famous spelling bee is the Scripps National Spelling Bee (http://www.spellingbee.com/), sponsored by the Scripps News Service. Each winner is sponsored by a Scripps newspaper, and this year's winner was Anamika Veeramani, from Ohio, who had to spell stromuhr to win. (A stromuhr is a kind of meter that measures how quickly blood goes through a vein.)

Want to try the test for yourself, to see if your spelling would be good enough to qualify? Click on this link: http://public.spellingbee.com/public/test/publicsample/?page=word.

If you think that only native English speakers would do well at this, think again: 21 of the 273 competitors in the 2010 competition do not speak English as their first language.

(Why "bee", you ask? In addition to the typical definition that everyone knows - a fat insect that makes honey and stings people - "bee" can also mean a social gathering where people combine work, competition, and amusement. No one's exactly sure where the word comes from, but it may come from Old English ben, "prayer".)

Matthew WHO?

Have you ever wondered why English has those double letters (like double "T") in the middle, or at the ends, of words?

I was watching the Giro d'Italia today on VEO7, and one of the announcers kept mispronouncing the name of Matthew Lloyd, the Australian cyclist. "Lloyd" is one of several last names which begin with double "L" (almost all of them are from Wales), and one of the only cases when you would see a double consonant at the beginning of words in English. This is different from Spanish, where "LL" and "RR" aren't really common at the beginning of words, but you can see them in some words (like Lleida).

So why do we have double consonants in English, if they don't represent a different sound?

Double consonants that are in the middle of words are where you separate syllables. Think of these two-syllable adjectives: fun·ny, sil·ly, hap·py, Fin·nish, com·mon: In each case, you would break the word in between the double consonants.

The same is true if the word has more than two syllables. This is especially true of words that are formed with suffixes: hap·pi·ness, in·suf·fer·able, bar·ris·ter, con·som·mé (meat broth), cor·res·pon·dence.

Double consonants (especially -ss) also happen frequently at the ends of words: kiss, miss, bliss. They're also extremely common at the ends of surnames: Pratt, Raitt, Schnurr, Flynn, Dunn.

And don't forget that if you need to put a suffix on the end of a verb that ends in a noun/consonant combination, you need to double the final consonant, too:
stop: stopped, stopping
counsel: counselled, counselling
travel: travelled, travelling
kid (=joke with someone): kidded, kidding
(**Note that the double -l only happens in British spelling, not American spelling.)

So if you're pronouncing a name like "Lloyd" or "Llewellyn, it's pronounced "loid", not "zloid."