Tag Archive: native speakers

Tara’s ESL VLOG: American Pronunciation – Part 3 – Consonant Sounds

 

Today’s video is the third installment of a series of videos about pronunciation that I am making for my students and YouTube viewers. In the first video we went over the Alphabet and the names of the letters that you are familiar with. The second video discussed the vowels and the use of the Color Vowel Chart. This video will focus on the Consonants, and the sounds they make. The most important part of today’s’ lesson is to remember that the “names” of the letters, ARE NOT the sounds they make. Today, we will practice the sounds. If you study the sounds of English then you will be able to improve your fluency by mastering STRESS and LINKING – 2 important components to sounding like a native speaker, and being understood by native speakers. So, let’s get started, and take a look at how to produce the consonant sounds of the English language.

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Tara’s ESL VLOG: The Future Part 2 – Simple Rules

 

What’s up everybody! My name is Tara Musich and I am a certified and experienced teacher of American English. Today I am presenting you with a video that’s part of a series that I am making on the Future Tense. Today’s video is about some special rules for using the future tense. These are some rules that I have shared with several of my students while working on using this tense and I thought it would be nice to share with you – my YouTube viewers and subscribers. So, we’re going to go over four rules together. We’ll go over the rule and then take a look at the example. You can look in the text below to follow along, if you like!

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Tara’s ESL VLOG: How to Choose the Right Teacher for YOU!

Hello again, Tara Musich here, teacher of American English. Today, we are going to talk about how to choose the right teacher for you, whether it be an online teacher or a live teacher, like face to face, a live face to face teacher. Most of us educators will sit here and try to tell you why you should choose me or this other person to teach you. So today I am going to give you a few tips on how to choose a teacher that is suitable to you and your personality.

So, there are three, three tips, three things that I think that are important when choosing a teacher, and the first one may sound a little funny, but I really think that it’s important. The first one is the person’s voice, the teacher’s voice. When you are learning a foreign language your teacher’s voice is very important. It is the voice that you are imitating. It is the voice that you should want to sound like. So that’s why I think that this is very important. It needs to be appealing to your ears, you should like it! It should be something you want to try to sound like. So, first and foremost the voice of your teacher I think is very important when you’re trying to work on speaking skills and pronunciation skills. Sounding good is always great, you know, in any language that we are learning.

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Three Good Ideas about Learning Language

1. Reading allows you to connect with the language, and it builds your vocabulary within a specific context – which makes your speaking stronger.

Many people “moan and groan” when presented with the prospect of having to read something – anything! As a lover of language, written or spoken, this was never a problem for me as I love to read literature of all types. However, as a teacher of English, I realize that not all my students feel the same way that I do, and so I asked myself how I could help my students to enjoy reading more. It seemed like the best answer was: only read what you are interested in!

You should put extra effort into finding a form of literature that is appealing to you – don’t read anything that seems boring to you! I have found in my experience that there is something for everyone, whether it is a paragraph of text or dialogue, a comic strip, a news article, a famous poem, a short book or even a series of novels! If your teacher has presented you with a text that you are not interested in, SPEAK UP, and tell them! The most important thing for you and your English language learning is to choose a subject that is not only useful in daily life, but also very interesting to you.

 

reading

 

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Tara’s ESL VLOG: The Future Part 1 – Will, Going To & Gunna

There are 2 forms that native speakers use to speak about the future. Many teachers and textbooks will tell you that there are rules for how to use each of them, but you should focus on using them interchangeably. Native speakers of English do this, so you can too! Once you can USE them easily, and switch between the two forms, then you can focus on the grammar rules. Let’s take a look at the following “language equations”:

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Read more, Learn more, Speak more

When I was attending university, working towards my degree in Spanish and Italian, I had to read a lot of books. Stories such as Don Quixote by Cervantes and Como Agua Para Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, filled my head with new phrases, exquisite vocabulary and a strong sense for Latin culture. What I did not realize while I was reading – and writing! Oh, the multitude of essays that I had to write! – was that my speaking was going to improve as well.

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