318 Part V: What Kind of Class Will I Have?
Pronunciation errors
If you imagine speaking English with your students’ accent you can begin to
estimate which phonemes (pronunciation segments) they find problematic.
Take a copy of all the phonemes in English and highlight the ones your
students struggle with. Then, whenever you introduce words which contain
these sounds, make a point of drilling the pronunciation thoroughly.
English has several sounds which don’t correspond to Hindi ones. English
/t/ seems to fall between a number of similar Hindi sounds but these are said
with the tongue between the upper and lower teeth or much further back in
the mouth. So students need to see where exactly in the mouth they can make
this sound. You could have a diagram up so that you can point out the correct
tongue position every time a word with /t/ crops up.
Adopt a similar approach for word stress and intonation patterns. Anything
which is markedly different from English should attract special attention
from you.
Grammatical errors
You don’t have to speak your students’ L1 to predict their grammar problems.
Just listen to the errors speakers of that language make and then do some
research by asking colleagues and checking reference books. In particular,
books which teach the students’ language to English speakers point out the
differences in grammar. It might seem illogical to an English speaker when a
student consistently refers to an inanimate object as he or she. For instance,
students may say, ‘She is a beautiful chair’.
However, knowledge of how gender works for objects in their L1 would cause
you to stress that in English objects are neutral. So in Italian a chair is ‘sedia’
and feminine because it ends with the vowel ‘a’. It probably wouldn’t occur
to you to point out that a chair is not ‘she’ without this kind of background
information.
Vocabulary errors
False friends are words which look or sound similar in two different languages
but have entirely different meanings.
For example, ‘byte’ in Swedish means prey or victim; in English it’s a group of
binary digits
Find out as much as you can about false friends and note them down whenever
you come across them so you can help your students avoid pitfalls.
Or how about words which function differently when you translate them? For
example compare English and French: ‘langue’ in French means language or
