Pages

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Suprasegmentals and Paralanguage: How to "relearn" them

Following are some of the ideas my husband and I have practiced in an effort to improve our suprasegmentals and paralanguage:

  1. observe native to native conversations for things such as: who talks when, how do they show agreement to another person's statement, disagreement, confusion, excitement, surprise, how do you know the difference between a question and a statement, etc.
  2. record conversations and then try to hum along with the intonation as you listen to the recording
  3. tracking: record yourself and then a native speaker saying the same sentences, listen to the records in order to observe the differences, if possible overlay the recordings to listen to them simultaneously
  4. draw intonation: listen to a recording that you have of native speech and try to draw the ups and downs that you hear, observe for any patterns - also do this with native speech from your first language and compare the differences.
  5. Play a few paralanguage games with native speakers such as: 
    • have the native speaker say various sentences with different emotions and you guess which emotion and vice versa; then discuss reasons for incorrect guesses
    • act out body language for a native speaker and ask the native speaker to explain what he or she assumes you are communicating with your various actions
Do you have any other ideas for improving suprasegmentals and paralanguage?  

2 comments:

  1. Imitate, imitate, imitate. Sounds lame, but it's how we learnt it with our own languages, right?

    ReplyDelete