Oh, my goodness, what a big class we had today! Our little group is really growing, eh? Pretty soon there will be a waiting list for a spot in the class.
Today we started by taking up yesterday's homework. It was a puzzle about the pronunciation of "can" and "can't." You all told me yesterday that it looked difficult, but you did pretty well with it. I was amazed that Husnieh did the puzzle in about 3 minutes before class started, even though she wasn't here yesterday. Wow.
Today we started talking about thought groups and pausing. We said that English speakers seem to be speaking very quickly. Actually, they are linking together the words within thought groups. We need to learn to do that, too. But before we learn to link, we have to learn where not to link. There are places where we need to pause.
There are three reasons for pausing:
1. It gives your listener time to process information.
2. It helps break the language into chunks of meaning.
3. Sometimes where you pause changes the entire meaning of a sentence!
We read a passage about a couple's camping trip in Algonquin Park, which is in the Muskokas in northern Ontario. First you read it and predicted where the pauses would be. Then you listened to me and checked your predictions. Then we all took turns reading parts of it.
Next we looked at the rules governing what we should keep together. Some examples were noun phrases, verb phrases, prepositional phrases, and clauses. We saw examples of each of these from the passage. Also, there is no need to pause in short phrases or sentences such as "Nice to meet you."
Having reviewed these rules, we returned to our passage to read it again. I wanted to see if your phrasing was better the second time through. Again we took turns and I think your phrasing did improve.
Tomorrow we will learn how you can change the meaning of a sentence if you don't put your pause in the right place.
Here are some links you can follow to learn more about our vocabulary from today:
Algonquin Park - pictures
Cheers!
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