domingo, 3 de junio de 2007

A naughty question



Hi, girls!

How do we decide whether our student will be intelligible to his/her boss?? Will we establish any parameters for 'comfortable intelligibility'?

2 comentarios:

Anónimo dijo...

Hello! Here is my comment. I think that the parameters for a comfortable intelligibility would be determined by the boss' accent. If he speaks RP English, then this variant should be the focus. Otherwise, intellegibility would be connected to all the aspects that convey meaning, includng paralinguistic features, body language and intonation as well as sounds.

Anónimo dijo...

Hello!!!!!! I think that it's quite diffcult for us, as teachers, to establish parameters for comfortable intelligibility. maybe what it is intelligible to us is not intelligible to others we, as teachers know our students, and we also know the kind of mistakes they could make. besides, if we share the mother tongue we will certainly understand him/her better. So, we as his/her teacher will not be good parameters to establish whether this student's boss will or will not understand him/her. As a result, we should find other ways to establish these parameters. i believe, as it was said in class, that we could ask another teacher to come to our class to listen to this student. but again, this decision may be influenced by the fact that this person is a teacher (see reasons above). we could also ask a native speaker to do this job, but this is quite difficult, there aren't many native speakers here in Bahia Blanca. but if we could find one, this could be a possibility. I agree with Romi when she said that we should focus on the boss' accent. but this should not be the only thing we do. we cannot ask our studet to accomodate to his/her boss accent. i also agree with what Wells and Jenkins said about this topic: that teachers should insist on the features that may provoke a breakdown in communication and this is what, according to my humble opinion do, to insist on the features that are likely to cause misunderstandings and also to work on the distinctions made by all native speakers.

gabriela