UNITS

Hi my name is Adela. I’m from Munich in Germany. I’m 17 years old but at the moment I’m living here in England. I help out like two or three times a week in a German class and I help the students when they do exercises with speaking or pronunciation. I came here to England to improve my English because I wasn’t such a good student.

ADELA: In fact, I go in Warlingham to school and I have got normal lessons like all the other English students. I have Maths, Art and Design and things like this but I also do school service.

VICKI: And how long have you been learning English?

ADELA: I’ve started learning English when I was eleven so now I’ve been learning English for six years.

VICKI: How hard do you find it, you know going to an English school. How hard is it to keep up with your English? To understand what people are saying and so on?

ADELA: And in the beginning it was really hard to concentrate all of the time. And also to understand the lessons, the teachers, the different accents of the teachers, when they have got a Scottish accent or something like this. It was really not so easy at the beginning of the year.

VICKI: So what do you think about your level of English? Do you find that people usually understand you or do you have a lot of problems with comprehension?

ADELA: I think it depends on the situation because sometimes like when I go into a shop and will buy something if it’s normal stuff, it’s OK but if there is a situation that I’m not used to in a shop, like would you like this or this, sometimes I’m a bit nervous and then I don’t know what to say.

VICKI: Are there any particular problems that you have when you are using your English?

ADELA: I think the main problem or one of the problems I’m confronted with the most often is when I’m talking it’s not so fluent. I have the impression like I stop and start again and I have to think about the words and it doesn’t sound really good. It doesn’t sound fluent so…

VICKI: O.K. And is there anything else that you have problems with?

ADELA: Sometimes, em, I don’t know which word goes together with which word so I don’t know like, I can’t think of an example but I don’t know yeah.

VICKI: So you have problems knowing which words go together, which words sound natural in English. O.K. And what about kind of grammar things? Do you have any problems with specific grammar points?

ADELA: Yeah. Definitely I have a problem with the past tense and I don’t know like when you have got a phrase or when you are telling someone something and you can’t change the times and I don’t do it in the right way and afterwards the person doesn’t understand what I want to say so it’s a bit all around it’s not so good.

VICKI: So Karen. Having heard what Adela said her particular problems were, what kind of advice would you give her?

KAREN: Well Adela’s spoken about three main problems. The first problem is fluency in speaking and that’s a problem that lots and lots of learners have. They know the grammar but when they actually try to speak, they feel that they’re stopping and starting. I think the first thing to remember is that native speakers do the same thing, that there is no problem with stopping and starting. One of the issues that learners face, however, is that often they leave a silence. So when they stop they don’t fill that silence. If you’re speaking in your own language you normally fill it with a noise. So for example, in English we often say errm or uh, so this errm sound you often see it written as errm. And it’s just a noise to fill the space to allow you to think of what you want to say next. Sometimes you need a bit more time than um so you can use phrases like uh. What was that? or ‘Uh. Hang on a minute.’ So that you can actually buy time to think of what you’re going to say next. So thinking of small phrases you can use to fill in. Don’t worry if you have to stop and think. Just think: Uh, how am I going to say that next? You can of course, if someone asks you a question, repeat the question. So if someone says ‘What’s the time?’ you can go: The time? Ah…it’s twenty past six. And repeating the question gives you time to think about what you want to say.

Now Adela’s second problem is knowing which words go together and putting words together that sound natural is known as collocation. Words co - locate. They go together. And this is one of the big problems for people in English because there seem to be no rules. It’s just habit. So for example, we say fish and chips. We don’t say chips and fish. There’s no real grammatical rule for that. It’s just habit. One of the things you can do to help you with collocation is to read more, to notice which words seem to be going together more often. So actually, once you’ve read an article from the newspaper, for example, sit down and think ‘Mm. Let me find all of the nouns. Which prepositions come after those nouns or which adjectives come before those nouns? So you’re actually looking actively for these collocating words or phrases, so that they become second nature to you.

VICKI: So if you read more you’re picking up the kind of things that often go together and learning those words as pairs of words really.

KAREN: Absolutely. You’re learning them as chunks of language. As words that fit together as a unit rather than having to build everything from individual words. And this is something that’s very, very important. If you learn units of words you can actually build bigger sentences rather than working with individual words.

Now Adela’s third problem is to do with tenses and this is such an issue for lots of learners, particularly, when do I use the past tense and when do I use the present perfect tense? So when do I say ‘Oh I did that yesterday.’ and when do I say ‘Oh. I’ve done it.’ One of the difficulties that learners have with English is realizing that we don’t have a single past tense. And really, our choice of tense depends on how we think about the action. Not when the action happened but how we think about it. So for example, if we think it’s relevant to us now, we’ll often use the present perfect tense. So, ‘Ah, I’ve done that.’ Just now. Whereas if we’re talking about something which we definitely view as in the past we’re much more likely to use a past tense. However, really I feel that Adela doesn’t really need to worry too much because quite often we can use adverbs to show exactly what we mean. So for example, if we say, ‘I’ve done that this morning.’ This morning tells us all we need to know.