Australian English

Here's one of those accents most people would be happy to understand. However, few English learners try to sound Aussie when they try to sound 'natural'. At least, that is the case in Spain, where most native English teachers come from either the USA or the British Isles and, naturally, teach their students their own accents. 

There are two main differences between dialects: vocabulary and pronunciation. Grammar tends to stay more or less the same in every dialect, although we could make some generalisations about this as well and say that such-and-such a dialect is similar to British English or to American English.

I'd say that Australian English is similar to British English, as far as grammar is concerned, and thanks to TV series like Neighbours, a lot of Brits have adopted some Aussie words, and even some of the intonation typical of speakers down under. 

VOCABULARY

This video illustrates some differences between Australian English and American English. 

In this video, you can see how Australian speakers tend to shorten words in colloquial speech. 

PRONUNCIATION

Well, it's been a bit of a challenge to find good videos to illustrate pronunciation... most of them were either really boring, or had been made by non-Australian people. Anyhow, here we go. 

An Australian comedian, Simon Taylor, goes over a few Aussie accents. 

Here, you have a comparison between Canadian English and Australian English. 

I hope you enjoyed this post... see you next time! 

A class debate

As far as speaking activities go, class debates are both entertaining and educational. I like them because you can work a lot of skills, some of which go beyond the purely linguistic ones.

This week, I have done a class debate on the subject of ambition.

We looked at a couple of quotes about ambition, highlighting both its positive and its negative side.

Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in. Bill Bradley

He who sacrifices his conscience to ambition burns a picture to obtain its ashes. Proveb.

Then, the students were divided into two groups-- those who would argue that ambition was mostly a positive quality, and those who would defend the opposite. Not every student was going to argue according to their belief, which made it all the more interesting. I have an odd number of students, so one of the teams had one extra member.

We agreed on a few different subtopics: the business world, historical figures, people in our own personal circles, etc. Each team would research these to fit in with their position. I gave the class two periods to prepare, and we established the debate would last between 30 and 45 minutes.

Finally, both teams chose a main speaker, who would start the debate by stating their team's position and a short but strong supporting reason.

On the day of the debate, the classroom furniture was arranged in such a way that all students were sitting down in neat rows, each team facing each other. I had prepared a rubric measuring the 5 main aspects I wanted to assess:

• respect for the other team
• quality of the information used
• relevance to argument
• presentation (voice, body language, eye contact)
• language skills

The students were made aware of the standards required. We tossed a coin and the debate began!

After the debate, I assigned the students an opinion essay with the following quote by Thomas Morton to discuss: "Where ambition ends, happiness begins."

I think that having done the class debate prior to the writing assignment works well to help students generate valuable ideas to use in their essays. A lot of them suffer from writer's block when it comes to talking about abstract ideas, so doing an 'undercover' brainstorming by way of a debate is an effective way to get those creative juices running. 

I am really happy with the result because students have 

• researched a topic they had some pre-conceived ideas about
• worked as a team in order to build solid arguments, in some cases anticipating counter-arguments 
• listened to each other in order to rebuff arguments effectively
• put into practice some complex language, such as second and third conditional sentences, reported speech, relative clauses, modal verbs... 
• used both speaking and writing skills

How about you? What is your experience with class debates?