Don´t Talk To Me In That Tone Of Voice

Well hello there. Happy New Year. I trust you all had a wonderful break over the festive period. I most certainly did.  This year I'm going to start by looking more at tone, stress and pronuncian. 

I popped back to the UK for a wedding and to see some family. It finally dawned on me while I was there that English people, or perhaps it´s just my family, use sarcasm to such an extent that a non-native speaker would obviously struggle to even get the jist of a conversation. 
It was at this point I decided to have a look at some ideas as to how we could convey such a vital part of our language to those learning it. 
To respond properly to a native speaker, an EFL learner has to pay attention. 
One of the easiest ways to get this across to non-native speakers is to give a list of 5-10 comments that could be sarcastic or sincere, and change their meaning with your tone. Have your students work in pairs to replicate your tone, and have them practice responding to each other in turns based on their tone. Examples include:

• I just love your outfit today. Are those blue sneakers?
• I can’t wait for my workout today at the gym!
• Eating healthy just makes me feel so good. I really don’t miss cake.

Get students to write a few of their own and then let each students read them aloud in either tone and ask the other students to guess if it´s Sarcastic or sincere. 

So there we go, the first blog of the year. Have fun with it. 

Until the next time.