PARENTING

Raising kids is one of the toughest and most fulfilling jobs in the world — and the one for which you might feel the least prepared.

Here are nine child-rearing tips that can help you feel more fulfilled as a parent.

Boosting Your Child's Self-Esteem

Kids start developing their sense of self as babies when they see themselves through their parents' eyes. Your tone of voice, your body language, and your every expression are absorbed by your kids. Your words and actions as a parent affect their developing self-esteem more than anything else.

Praising accomplishments, however small, will make them feel proud; letting kids do things independently will make them feel capable and strong. By contrast, belittling comments or comparing a child unfavorably with another will make kids feel worthless.

Avoid making loaded statements or using words as weapons. Comments like "What a stupid thing to do!" or "You act more like a baby than your little brother!" cause damage just as physical blows do.

Choose your words carefully and be compassionate. Let your kids know that everyone makes mistakes and that you still love them, even when you don't love their behavior.

Catch Kids Being Good

Have you ever stopped to think about how many times you react negatively to your kids in a given day? You may find yourself criticizing far more often than complimenting. How would you feel about a boss who treated you with that much negative guidance, even if it was well intentioned?

The more effective approach is to catch kids doing something right: "You made your bed without being asked — that's terrific!" or "I was watching you play with your sister and you were very patient." These statements will do more to encourage good behavior over the long run than repeated scoldings.

Make a point of finding something to praise every day. Be generous with rewards — your love, hugs, and compliments can work wonders and are often reward enough. Soon you will find you are "growing" more of the behavior you would like to see.

Set Limits and Be Consistent With Your Discipline

Discipline is necessary in every household. The goal of discipline is to help kids choose acceptable behaviors and learn self-control. They may test the limits you establish for them, but they need those limits to grow into responsible adults.

Establishing house rules helps kids understand your expectations and develop self-control. Some rules might include: no TV until homework is done, and no hitting, name-calling, or hurtful teasing allowed.

You might want to have a system in place: one warning, followed by consequences such as a "time out" or loss of privileges. A common mistake parents make is failure to follow through with the consequences. You can't discipline kids for talking back one day and ignore it the next. Being consistent teaches what you expect.

Make Time for Your Kids

It's often difficult for parents and kids to get together for a family meal, let alone spend quality time together. But there is probably nothing kids would like more. Get up 10 minutes earlier in the morning so you can eat breakfast with your child or leave the dishes in the sink and take a walk after dinner. Kids who aren't getting the attention they want from their parents often act out or misbehave because they're sure to be noticed that way.

Many parents find it rewarding to schedule together time with their kids. Create a "special night" each week to be together and let your kids help decide how to spend the time. Look for other ways to connect — put a note or something special in your kid's lunchbox.

Adolescents seem to need less undivided attention from their parents than younger kids. Because there are fewer windows of opportunity for parents and teens to get together, parents should do their best to be available when their teen does express a desire to talk or participate in family activities. Attending concerts, games, and other events with your teen communicates caring and lets you get to know more about your child and his or her friends in important ways.

Don't feel guilty if you're a working parent. It is the many little things you do — making popcorn, playing cards, window shopping — that kids will remember.

Be a Good Role Model

Young kids learn a lot about how to act by watching their parents. The younger they are, the more cues they take from you. Before you lash out or blow your top in front of your child, think about this: Is that how you want your child to behave when angry? Be aware that you're constantly being watched by your kids. Studies have shown that children who hit usually have a role model for aggression at home.

Model the traits you wish to see in your kids: respect, friendliness, honesty, kindness, tolerance. Exhibit unselfish behavior. Do things for other people without expecting a reward. Express thanks and offer compliments. Above all, treat your kids the way you expect other people to treat you.

Make Communication a Priority

You can't expect kids to do everything simply because you, as a parent, "say so." They want and deserve explanations as much as adults do. If we don't take time to explain, kids will begin to wonder about our values and motives and whether they have any basis. Parents who reason with their kids allow them to understand and learn in a nonjudgmental way.

Make your expectations clear. If there is a problem, describe it, express your feelings, and invite your child to work on a solution with you. Be sure to include consequences. Make suggestions and offer choices. Be open to your child's suggestions as well. Negotiate. Kids who participate in decisions are more motivated to carry them out.

Be Flexible and Willing to Adjust Your Parenting Style

If you often feel "let down" by your child's behavior, perhaps you have unrealistic expectations. Parents who think in "shoulds" (for example, "My kidshould be potty-trained by now") might find it helpful to read up on the matter or to talk to other parents or child development specialists.

Kids' environments have an effect on their behavior, so you might be able to change that behavior by changing the environment. If you find yourself constantly saying "no" to your 2-year-old, look for ways to alter your surroundings so that fewer things are off-limits. This will cause less frustration for both of you.

As your child changes, you'll gradually have to change your parenting style. Chances are, what works with your child now won't work as well in a year or two.

Teens tend to look less to their parents and more to their peers for role models. But continue to provide guidance, encouragement, and appropriate discipline while allowing your teen to earn more independence. And seize every available moment to make a connection!

Show That Your Love Is Unconditional

As a parent, you're responsible for correcting and guiding your kids. But how you express your corrective guidance makes all the difference in how a child receives it.

When you have to confront your child, avoid blaming, criticizing, or fault-finding, which undermine self-esteem and can lead to resentment. Instead, strive to nurture and encourage, even when disciplining your kids. Make sure they know that although you want and expect better next time, your love is there no matter what.

Know Your Own Needs and Limitations as a Parent

Face it — you are an imperfect parent. You have strengths and weaknesses as a family leader. Recognize your abilities — "I am loving and dedicated." Vow to work on your weaknesses — "I need to be more consistent with discipline." Try to have realistic expectations for yourself, your spouse, and your kids. You don't have to have all the answers — be forgiving of yourself.

And try to make parenting a manageable job. Focus on the areas that need the most attention rather than trying to address everything all at once. Admit it when you're burned out. Take time out from parenting to do things that will make you happy as a person (or as a couple).

Focusing on your needs does not make you selfish. It simply means you care about your own well-being, which is another important value to model for your children.

Reviewed by: Steven Dowshen, MD

Listening Skill Problems

 Listening: Problems and Solutions

Taken from Fan Yagang

In teaching listening comprehension we must be careful not to go to extremes, either by being concerned too exclusively with theories without thinking about their application to teaching, or by obstinately following frozen routines-opening the textbook and explaining new words, playing the tape recorder, and asking/answering questions. It is essential for a teacher to have an overall understanding of what listening is, why it is difficult for foreign-language learners, and what some solutions may be. The vital question is how to bridge the gap between an analysis of listening and actual classroom teaching.

What is listening?

Listening is the ability to identify and understand what others are saying. This involves understanding a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary, and grasping his meaning (Howatt and Dakin 1974). An able listener is capable of doing these four things simultaneously. Willis (1981:134) lists a series of micro-skills of listening, which she calls enabling skills. They are:

• predicting what people are going to talk about.

guessing at unknown words or phrases without panicking

• using one’s own knowledge of the subject to help one understand

• identifying relevant points; rejecting irrelevant information

• retaining relevant points (note-taking, summarizing)

• recognizing discourse markers, e.g., Well; Oh, another thing is; Now, finally; etc. • recognizing cohesive devices, e.g., such as and which, including link words, pronouns, references, etc.

• understanding different intonation patterns and uses of stress, etc., which give clues to meaning and social setting

• understanding inferred information, e.g., speakers’ attitude or intentions

What are some listening problems?

The evidence that shows why listening is difficult comes mainly from four sources: the message to be listened to, the speaker, the listener, and the physical setting.

The Message

Content. Many learners find it more difficult to listen to a taped message than to read the same message on a piece of paper, since the listening passage comes into the ear in the twinkling of an eye, whereas reading material can be read as long as the reader likes.  The listening material may deal with almost any area of life. It might include street gossip, proverbs, new products, and situations unfamiliar to the student. Also, in a spontaneous conversation speakers frequently change topics.

The content is usually not well organized. In many cases listeners cannot predict what speakers are going to say, whether it is a news report on the radio, an interviewer’s questions, an everyday conversation, etc.

Messages on the radio or recorded on tape cannot be listened to at a slower speed. Even in conversation it is impossible to ask the speaker to repeat something as many times as the interlocutor might like.

Linguistic Features. Liaison (the linking of words in speech when the second word begins with a vowel, e.g., an orange /@nOrIndZ/) and elision (leaving out a sound or sounds, e.g., suppose may be pronounced /sp@uz/ in rapid speech) are common phenomena that make it difficult for students to distinguish or recognize individual words in the stream of speech. They are used to seeing words written as discrete entities in their textbooks.

If listening materials are made up of everyday conversation, they may contain a lot of colloquial words and expressions, such as stuff for material, guy for man, etc., as well as slang. Students who have been exposed mainly to formal or bookish English may not be familiar with these expressions.

In spontaneous conversations people sometimes use ungrammatical sentences because of nervousness or hesitation. They may omit elements of sentences or add something redundant. This may make it difficult for the listener to understand the meaning.

The Speaker

Ur (1984:7) points out that “in ordinary conversation or even in much extempore speech-making or lecturing we actually say a good deal more than would appear to be necessary in order to convey our message. Redundant utterances may take the form of repetitions, false starts, re-phrasings, self-corrections, elaborations, tautologies, and apparently meaningless additions such as I mean or you know.” This redundancy is a natural feature of speech and may be either a help or a hindrance, depending on the students’ level. It may make it more difficult for beginners to understand what the speaker is saying; on the other hand, it may give advanced students more time to “tune in” to the speaker’s voice and speech style.

Learners tend to be used to their teacher’s accent or to the standard variety of British or American English. They find it hard to understand speakers with other accents.  Spoken prose, as in news broadcasting and reading aloud written texts, is characterized by an even pace, volume, pitch, and intonation. Natural dialogues, on the other hand, are full of hesitations, pauses, and uneven intonation. Students used to the former kinds of listening material may sometimes find the latter difficult to understand.

The Listener

Foreign-language students are not familiar enough with clichés and collocations in English to predict a missing word or phrase. They cannot, for example, be expected to know that rosy often collocates with cheeks nor to predict the last word will be something like rage when they hear the phrase he was in a towering. . . . This is a major problem for students.

Lack of sociocultural, factual, and contextual knowledge of the target language can present an obstacle to comprehension because language is used to express its culture (Anderson and Lynch 1988).

Foreign-language learners usually devote more time to reading than to listening, and so lack exposure to different kinds of listening materials. Even our college students majoring in English have no more than four hours’ regular training per week.

Both psychological and physical factors may have a negative effect on perception and interpretation of listening material. It is tiring for students to concentrate on interpreting unfamiliar sounds, words, and sentences for long periods.

Physical Setting

Noise, including both background noises on the recording and environmental noises, can take the listener’s mind off the content of the listening passage.

Listening material on tape or radio lacks visual and aural environmental clues. Not seeing the speaker’s body language and facial expressions makes it more difficult for the listener to understand the speaker’s meaning. Unclear sounds resulting from poor-quality equipment can interfere with the listener’s comprehension.

Some solutions

What can teachers do to help students master the difficulties?

Not all the problems described above can be overcome. Certain features of the message and the speaker, for instance, are inevitable. But this does not mean that the teacher can do nothing about them. S/he can at least provide the students with suitable listening materials, background and linguistic knowledge, enabling skills, pleasant classroom conditions, and useful exercises to help them discover effective listening strategies. Here are a few helpful ideas:

The Message

1. Grade listening materials according to the students’ level, and provide authentic materials rather than idealized, filtered samples. It is true that natural speech is hard to grade and it is difficult for students to identify the different voices and cope with frequent overlaps. Nevertheless, the materials should progress step by step from semi-authenticity that displays most of the linguistic features of natural speech to total authenticity, because the final aim is to understand natural speech in real life.

2. Design task-oriented exercises to engage the students’ interest and help them learn listening skills subconsciously. As Ur (1984:25) has said, “Listening exercises are most effective if they are constructed round a task. That is to say, the students are required to do something in response to what they hear that will demonstrate their understanding.” She has suggested some such tasks: expressing agreement or disagreement, taking notes, marking a picture or diagram according to instructions, and answering questions. Compared with traditional multiple-choice questions, task- based exercises have an obvious advantage: they not only test the students’ listening comprehension but also encourage them to use different kinds of listening skills and strategies to reach their destination in an active way.

3. Provide students with different kinds of input, such as lectures, radio news, films, TV plays, announcements, everyday conversation, interviews, storytelling, English songs, and so on.

Brown and Yule (1983) categorize spoken texts into three broad types: static, dynamic, and abstract. Texts that describe objects or give instructions are static texts; those that tell a story or recount an incident are dynamic texts; those that focus on someone’s ideas and beliefs rather than on concrete objects are abstract texts. Brown and Yule suggest that the three types of input should be provided according to the difficulties they present and the students’ level. They draw a figure, in which difficulty increases from left to right, and, within any one type of input, complexity increases from top to bottom.

4. Try to find visual aids or draw pictures and diagrams associated with the listening topics to help students guess or imagine actively.

The Speaker

1. Give practice in liaisons and elisions in order to help students get used to the acoustic forms of rapid natural speech. It is useful to find rapidly uttered colloquial collocations and ask students to imitate native speakers’ pronunciation.

2. Make students aware of different native-speaker accents. Of course, strong regional accents are not suitable for training in listening, but in spontaneous conversation native speakers do have certain accents. Moreover, the American accent is quite different from the British and Australian. Therefore, it is necessary to let students deal with different accents, especially in extensive listening.

3. Select short, simple listening texts with little redundancy for lower-level students and complicated authentic materials with more redundancy for advanced learners. It has been reported that elementary-level students are not capable of interpreting extra information in the redundant messages, whereas advanced listeners may benefit from messages being expanded, paraphrased, etc. (Chaudron 1983).

The Listener

1. Provide background knowledge and linguistic knowledge, such as complex sentence structures and colloquial words and expressions, as needed.

2. Give, and try to get, as much feedback as possible. Throughout the course the teacher should bridge the gap between input and students’ response and between the teacher’s feedback and students’ reaction in order to keep activities purposeful. It is important for the listening-class teacher to give students immediate feedback on their performance. This not only promotes error correction but also provides encouragement. It can help students develop confidence in their ability to deal with listening problems. Student feedback can help the teacher judge where the class is going and how it should be guided.

3. Help students develop the skills of listening with anticipation, listening for specific information, listening for gist, interpretation and inference, listening for intended meaning, listening for attitude, etc., by providing varied tasks and exercises at different levels with different focuses.

A typology of activities for a listening lesson

I suggest a variety of exercises, tasks, and activities appropriate to different stages of a listening lesson (pre-listening, while-listening, and post-listening). Good classroom activities can themselves be effective solutions to listening problems.

The list covers a wide range of listening activities from simple to more sophisticated. Some teachers, accustomed to following exactly the exercises and tasks provided in the textbook without thinking about whether they are suitable for their students or not, might look on these activities as extra work and a burden. I would like to point out that it is a pleasure and a positive experience to try various exercises, tasks, and classroom activities, for successful lessons depend on the teacher’s knowing and using a variety of teaching methods. Teachers should have at their fingertips a set of exercises, tasks, and activities that they can use with their classes whenever they may be needed.

Conclusion

Some teachers think that listening is the easiest skill to teach, whereas most students think it is the most difficult to improve. This contradiction tells us that there are some things about teaching listening that need to be explored. Perhaps those who say it is “the easiest to teach” mean that it does not require much painstaking lesson preparation and all they need to do is play the tapes and test the students’ comprehension. But is there nothing more to teaching listening than testing? We must find out all we can about how listening can be improved and what activities are useful to this end and then use this knowledge and these activities in our own classrooms. 

Listening Skill Exercise click here

Teaching Reading Strategies

Best Practices for Teaching Strategic Reading

The International Reading Association’s Commission on Adolescent Literacy stated succinctly, “Continual instruction beyond the early grades is needed” (Moore, Bean, Birdyshaw, & Rycik, 1999, p. 3). Getting readers off to a good start certainly is crucial in the early grades, but ongoing instruction in the later grades is necessary for maintaining and, in many cases, accelerating readers’ growth.  omprehension strategies are vital components of adolescent literacy instruction. The comprehension strategy instruction in Edge was designed with the following principles and practices in mind.

1. Direct, Explicit Instruction

Effective comprehension strategy instruction for adolescents includes direct, explicit teaching (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004). Such instruction calls for teachers to scaffold students’ learning by guiding them to a particular strategy then openly and plainly describing it. Teachers model, or demonstrate, the strategy—frequently thinking through the process aloud—to show it in action.

On every Before Reading page in Edge, the “how to” of each reading strategy is explicitly modeled,

using the actual text to be read. Strategy questions during and after reading provide additional scaffolds, allowing teachers to gradually release responsibility for the use of the strategy to students, so that they can make it their own.

2. Show, Don’t Tell

An important part of direct, explicit instruction calls for teachers to demonstrate and explain why particular strategies are useful as well as how and when to use them (Biancarosa & Snow, 2004).

In Edge, every strategy has explicit step-by-step explanations of how to perform the strategy. The explanations are tailored to fit youths’ funds of general knowledge and facility with everyday

strategic thinking. In every instance the explanatory steps contain model responses so youth actually see an example of what is being emphasized; no step is merely mentioned.

3. Connect Reading to Students’ Lives and Their Out-of-School Literacies

We know that youth come to school with substantial funds of everyday knowledge acquired from their families, communities, peers, and popular culture (Moje, et al., 2004). In effective secondary schools, teachers regularly form webs of connections between this knowledge and the lesson being taught (Langer, 2002). Teachers overtly point out these connections and invite students to make their own. Every strategy introduction in Edge (“How to Read Short Stories”, for example) begins with an

inductive learning experience, in which students are able to connect the skills and processes involved in the reading strategy to something they already know how to do in their everyday lives. “Connect Reading to Your Life” shows students who may have negative opinions about their abilities as readers that they really do have valuable cognitive abilities that they can bring to bear on texts.

4. Focused Instruction

Focusing comprehension strategy instruction—one strategy at a time—guards against overwhelming

students (Nokes & Dole, 2004). A noteworthy feature of Edge is its focus on a single reading strategy in each unit. Throughout each unit students have multiple, varied opportunities to develop expertise with a particular strategy.

5. Promote Transfer Across Genres

A time-honored finding among researchers is that the characteristics of various genres present readers

varying challenges (Jetton & Alexander, 2004; Moore, Readence, & Rickelman, 1983; RAND Reading Study Group, 2002). Strategies for reading fiction in an English/language arts class do not

travel well to reading algebra in a mathematics class. In Edge students meet recurring commentaries

on one particular strategy along with multiple opportunities to perform it with different genres and

passages. Every main reading selection in Edge is paired with a secondary, or adjunct, selection with

which the targeted reading strategy is also taught. This pairing helps students understand, for example,

that the way that they relate main ideas and details in expository nonfiction is both similar and different than the way that they do it with poetry. Explicitly teaching how the same reading strategy works across genres helps students truly own the strategy and apply it independently to whatever reading they do in the future.

6. Encourage Cognitive Collaboration

Bringing students together to work through comprehension tasks is another effective practice

(Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003; Greenleaf, Schoenbach, Cziko, & Mueller, 2001).

Youth team with others, mixing perspectives and insights to solve problems. They converse in the

form of a dialogue, with speakers responding to what one another said. Thinking is aloud/allowed.

Among other things, youth think and talk about the ways they apply comprehension strategies to

particular texts. Edge intersperses prompts throughout the reading selections for students to voice their applications of the targeted reading strategy. This scaffold provides a forum for publicly exploring what was just presented, for demystifying ways to comprehend texts. Additionally, each literature cluster and unit in Edge ends with opportunities for learners to jointly review and refine their applications of the strategy. This practice positions students as members of a learning community, a place where they can interact and improve their understandings of comprehension strategies.

Conclusion

The reading comprehension strategy instruction found in Edge provides adolescents rich and meaningful opportunities to take control of their reading. It shows youth that reading proficiently is not a matter of being innately smart but, in part, a matter of applying appropriate strategies. 

A paragraph

Paragraphs

Adapted from The Little, Brown Handbook, 11th Edition, Contributors Dayne Sherman, Jayetta Slawson, Natasha Whitton, and Jeff Wiemelt, 2010, 72-111. Prepared by the Southeastern Writing Center. Last updated July, 2011.

A paragraph is a group of related sentences serving three important purposes:

•  Paragraphs join together sentences into a unit that works to support an essay’s main idea or thesis.
•  Paragraphs provide breaks that allow readers to pause and make sense of what they are reading.
•  Paragraphs indicate the movement or development of ideas in an essay. 

Each new paragraph–or in some cases, clusters of paragraphs–contributes important new information that moves a reader one step closer to an essay’s main idea or thesis.

When to paragraph:

• To signal a shift in focus.
• To signal a shift in time or place.
• To signal the next step in a sequence of steps.
• To add particular emphasis to important ideas.
• To set off a new person’s contribution to an unfolding dialogue.
• To set off introductory and concluding material from the body of an essay.

Paragraph Unity and Continuity

Just as paragraphs work together to develop a thesis, the sentences within an effective paragraph support and extend one another to develop a single idea. Thus, you can think of a paragraph as a kind of “mini-essay.” Like a full essay, an effective paragraph:

• presents a clear main or controlling idea
• supports or develops that main idea
• arranges ideas and supporting material in an orderly pattern, and
• uses logical associations and transitions to link one idea to the next

Paragraph Unity

As a rule, every effective paragraph has an explicit topic sentence, which is stated at or near the beginning and to which all other sentences in the paragraph are logically related. We refer to that logical relationship as paragraph unity. To test for paragraph unity, ask yourself how each sentence of a paragraph helps support or develop the topic sentence of that paragraph. Give a name to the relationship between the two sentences (e.g., exemplification, classification, definition).

Paragraph Continuity

Continuity, or the linkage between sentences in a paragraph or between paragraphs, requires that you write each new sentence or paragraph with the adjacent sentences and paragraphs in mind. You want your reader to feel that one sentence or paragraph has grown naturally out of its predecessor and leads naturally to what follows–an effect that is typically achieved by picking some word or idea from one sentence or paragraph (what you might think of as “given” information) and taking it further in the next (the “new” information you’re offering).

Some Patterns of Paragraph Development:

• Narrative paragraphs tell a story and are often arranged chronologically (i.e., according to time).
• Descriptive paragraphs give details about the way something is sensed or experienced. The arrangement of those details typically reflects the logical order in which an object is sensed or experienced (i.e., from top to bottom or front to back; from sight to sound; from smell to taste).E
• Exemplifying paragraphs use specific examples to illustrate and elaborate a more general claim.
• Process paragraphs describe how something works or unfolds as a sequence of steps (e.g., in a recipe).
• Cause and effect paragraphs examine why events occur and their consequences.
• Comparison and contrast paragraphs examine the similarities and differences between things and events. These similarities and differences can be organized on an alternating point-by-point basis(e.g., X1 vs. Y1; X2 vs. Y2; X3 vs. Y3), or they can be handled independently one set at a time (X1, X2, X3 vs. Y1, Y2, Y3).
• Classification and division paragraphs group separate objects into categories according to common qualities or separate objects and groups of objects into their component parts according to their differences.
• Definition paragraphs include the term being defined, the class or category of things to which it belongs, and the details that distinguish it from other members of its class.

Related How to Write an  Paragraph click here

Example of Simple Paragraphs 

Aspects in Speaking Skill

SPEAKING SKILL

Speaking is an activity to express ideas orally.

Speaking is one of two productive skills in a language teaching. It is defined as a process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal or oral form (Chaney, 1988:13 and Gebhard, 1996:169). Simply, speaking is a process of building meaningful words to share ideas or information orally. 

Sometimes, as beginner we never think what aspects included in our speaking. We only try to speak and speak in English. Actually, we should know that exactly in speaking skills there are some aspects we should concern.

According to Syakur (2007:4), there are at least five components of speaking skill concerned with comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and fluency.  

1.  

1. Comprehension

For oral communication, it certainly requires a subject to respond, to speech as well as to initiate it.

2.  Grammar

It is needed for students to arrange a correct sentence in conversation. It is inline with explanation suggested by Heaton (1978: 5) that student’s ability to manipulate structure and to distinguish appropriate grammatical form in appropriate ones. The utility of grammar is also to learn the correct way to gain expertise in a language in oral and written form.

3  Vocabulary

One cannot communicative effectively or express their ideas both oral and written form if they do not have sufficient vocabulary. Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed (Willid in Mora,2007:5). So, based on this explanation, the researcher concluded that without mastering vocabulary sufficiently is English learners will not be able to speak English or write English properly.

4.   Pronunciation

Pronunciation is the way for students to produce clearer language when they speak. It deals with the phonological process that refers to the component of a grammar made up of the elements and principles that determine how sounds vary and pattern in a language. There are two features of pronunciation; phonemes and suprasegmental features. A speaker who constantly mispronounces a range of  12phonemes can be extremely difficult for a speaker from another language communityto understand (Gerard, 2007:5). From the statement above, the researcher concluded that pronunciation is theknowledge of studying about how the words in a particular language are producedclearly when people speak. In speaking, pronunciation plays a vital role in order tomake the process of communication easy to understand.

5.  Fluency

Fluency can be defined as the ability to speak fluently and accurately.Fluency in speaking is the aim of many language learners. Signs of fluency include a reasonably fast speed of speaking and only a small number of pauses and “ums” or “ers”. These signs indicate that the speaker does not have spend a lot of time searching for the language items needed to express the message (Brown in Mora,2007:5). From the ideas above, the researcher concluded that another important component is fluency. Fluency means the capability of someone speaks fluently an accurately with little pauses like “ums” and “ers”.

We can conclude, that actually in our speaking should concern in those aspects. Have you had those aspects in your speaking skill? if the answer is no, minimally or at least, you have two or three aspects in your speaking now, step by step we can improve till we get those five aspects. 

For another way to improve our speaking skill, we should have a self confidence. Watch  and click this.

Thank yo,  may it be useful :)

Latihan 1

STRAWBERRY CHARLOTTE PUDDING

Strawberry Charlotte Pudding

Ingredients:

–  4 sheets gelatin, soaked in cold water
–  90 ml of ready-made strawberry juice
–  75 grams sugar
–  2 egg yolks
–  165 ml of liquid milk
–  ½ can of sweetened condensed milk

Strawberry Ingredients:

o   150 g fresh strawberries, cut into pieces
o   90 ml strawberry jam
o   60 grams sugar
o   2 drops of red chili coloring
o   20 grams cornstarch
o   3 tablespoons water
o   225 ml heavy cream

Decoration Materials:

*   Sponge finger that ready to use
*   50 grams of strawberry jam
*   10 ml of water
*   3 drops of red chili coloring

How to Make:

1. 

   Steps
   Heat the strawberry juice and gelatin, stir until melted.
2. Whip egg yolks, milk, and sweetened condensed milk until smooth. Heat the mixture until boiled, stir frequently. Enter the gelatin mixture then heat again. Then lift and cool.
3. Blend the strawberries until smooth, put cornstarch, sugar,water, strawberry jam, and red peppers
   coloring and cook, stir frequently until thick.
4. Arrange sponge finger on the edge and bottom of the panapart pairs.
5. Sweep the bottom with the strawberry mixture.
6. Whip heavy cream until stiff, add gelatin mixture, stirring frequently. Add the dye.
   Stir well.
7. Pour this batter into the pan and blend it apart pairs.
8. Decoration: heat the strawberry jam and water until melted.Once cool,  put into a plastic triangle. Create a sketch on it.Decorate the edge with whipped cream and decorate withstrawberries cut.

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