Adult Communication Skills - Pronunciation

 What I learnt from the letter `X'

Hmm, you may well wonder, what has adult communication skills, in general, and pronunciation, in particular, got to do with the letter `X'?  One would have heard of something being X-rated, and come across too few words beginning with `x' and the impossibly sounding x-words with a hint of the snake's hiss in it!

I was having a particularly challenging moment!  The adult student in front of me stared hard at me, probably trying to get a hint from the way I moved my mouth.  I laboured on and stressed, "Ex' but she continued to vocalise it as "Es".  I needed a breather, a time-out period, to think how I could lead her to differentiate between `ex' and `es'.  It didn't help even when I continually tried telling her it was an `x' and not `s' after the `e'. 

I had taught language acquisition courses in the university and read through quite a bit of literature on the `critical age theory' when I embarked on my research in designing and testing the effectiveness of the Literature-Driven English Curriculum.  So, could this be an instant of the `critical age theory' proving itself correct in that this adult learner of the English Language simply could not vocalise the `x' because it is not a sound she is familiar with in her native language?  As such, she has reached a stage where unfamiliar sounds may be difficult for her to vocalise since she is already set in her ways.  Her repertoire of sounds becomes limited to what she has learnt in her native language, and hence, non-native sounds that require different modes of working one's speech apparatus become difficult to imitate.

What I have learnt in my experience is that theories are well and good to increase our understanding of the status-quo, of the state of affairs as it exists in the present moment.  However, as an educator, I have to go beyond being a linguist and discover a way to reach the student, whatever the `critical age theory' may say.

A few more attempts were made to spit out the correct `ex' in preference to the `es'.  Then, lo and behold, the `Eureka' moment descended on both of us.  We looked excitedly at each other as I scribbled on the whiteboard, `eks'.  "You are missing out the `k'!" I was almost in a rapture as she finally pronounced `ex' and thereafter, `expert' correctly. 

Indeed, our lean and mean, `x' stealthily hid three letters in it!

If you think, learning a language is boring, think again!  It is a puzzle to be solved, and that puzzle also holds the key to unlocking man's ingenuity in creating languages and systems to propagate these languages.

Come join us for our first online Adult Communication Skills course in which you will learn pronunciations of words in common usage, learn sentence structure and create sentences with appropriate structures.