The Rights and Responsibilities of a Citizen

Hello, students!

Here are this week's helpful links.

Discover Canada - Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship (with option to listen to chapter)

Settlement.org - What are my rights and responsibilities as a Canadian citizen?

Enable Flash and explore the virtual Charter in your language.

Here is Discover Canada in LARGE PRINT.

Steps to Justice

Refugee Rights in Ontario

YouTube has many videos about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

For our pronunciation topic, watch Rachel's English.

Credit Calculators

Hello, students of the seniors' class!

This week we finished our unit on credit cards and credit. We used English for Financial Literacy materials and audio files found HERE.

Today after our group presentations, you showed interest in credit calculators. Mr. Yi wants to know what the income tax rates are in Canada, so I've added links for that, too.  Happy learning!

TD Bank - Mortgage Calculator

Personal Tax Calculator - Canada
Canada Revenue Agency - Tax calculators

To continue our pronunciation lesson, you can visit Rachel's English for her video on vowel lengthening before voiced consonants.

Contrasting the Front Lax Vowels

Hello!

Today we finished up our worksheet from Tuesday, which was about lengthening /i/ and /I/ before voiced consonants. We did some oral practice chorally and individually. I notice that you all like it when I listen to each of you separately and give immediate feedback.

We looked at a continuum of four words demonstrating how a final voiced consonant affects the length of the preceding vowel sound. Say bit, beat, bid, bead. The shortest vowel is bit and the longest is bead. But we hold the /I/ in bid longer than the /iy/ in beat.

Next we started a new set of vowel contrasts: /I/ and /ɛ/. We did some minimal pairs, listening discrimination and minimal sentences. We did a couple of rounds where you held up one finger or two depending on which sentence you thought I said. Then you each took a turn challenging me and the rest of the class to guess which one you were saying. With just a few tweaks, everyone who had a problem with these sounds improved their production of it quickly. We all agreed it was time to move on and do the dialogue.

After listening to the audio and answering some questions, we only had time for two pairs to perform the script. We will pick up where we left off on Monday.

Have a nice weekend! Do you think it will snow?

Syllables, Stress and More /iy/

Hello!

Today we took a short detour from our adventure with vowels to talk about syllables. We will do much more with syllables and word stress later. For now we just needed a brief orientation to syllables and stress.

I asked you what a syllable is and you first told me that it's a part of a word. Yes, it is! What else? Together we discovered that every syllable has a vowel sound. If every language has a certain music, then to learn the music of English, we must learn the rhythm of English. To do this, we have to learn about syllables and stress.

I handed Ahmed G. a large item covered in a big fabric case and asked him to open it. What was inside? It was my djembe. That's an African drum. Together we talked about syllables and passed the drum around so that we could beat out the syllables of different words.

I made four columns on the board and asked you all to give me some food words. Together we figured out where to put each word: column one for one-syllable words; column two for two-syllable words, etc.

Next we talked about stress. What is word stress? You told me that there is always one syllable that is stronger. That's right. The stressed syllable is longer. It has a clearer vowel sound. It also has higher pitch and is sometimes a bit louder.

With this new information, I asked you to look again at our handout from yesterday. In some words we hold the /iy/ sound longer than in other words.

For example, we hold it longer in: tea, bean, meal and three.

We don't hold the /iy/ sound quite as long in pizza, peach, repeat or meat.

What's the rule?

1. All vowels are longer before a voiced consonant.
2. All vowels are longer in a stressed open syllable.
3. Vowels are not held as long before voiceless consonants.
4. Vowels are not held as long in unstressed open syllables.

So now you know why I don't like to use the terms "short" and "long" vowels in our class. Those words are great for teaching little Canadian children about vowels. But you are not children. We are adults. The fact is that all vowels are longer before voiced consonants. So I will be using different words to classify the vowels.

After talking about the rule, we did some more practice with the /iy/ sound in words.

See you tomorrow in the computer lab. On Monday we will resume vowels with the /I/ sound.