Kamis @ UKSW 15 Okt - Interpersonal Speaking

Each Thursday at 11am I join Duncan's "Interpersonal Speaking" class, a group of 16 students. The focus of the lesson is on pronunciation practice. Perhaps not the sort of class to be taught by two Australians! Duncan speaks slowly, clearly, and loudly, when giving examples of correct practice. Which is what you want from a teacher. Today we were looking at what's known as "reduced and", that is, our tendency to reduce "and" to "an'" or, in most instances, 'n'. For instance, "tea and sugar" (Duncan says, the class repeats), becomes "tea an' sugar" (Duncan says, class repeats), which becomes "tea'n'sugar". Love the way we compress language! Then we did the "reduced can", where we eliminate the vowel sound so that it sounds like "ken."

Duncan then got me to read through some examples of common expressions, short sentences that the students had to repeat. For example, "How're you doing?" and "How's it going?" and "What'll you have?" As I explained to the students, in Australia we'd do some damage to the "you" in those sentences, making it into "ya." So off I went, saying the sentences, the students repeating them. I'd do the formal/English version ("How're you doing?"), and follow it with the Australian version ("How're ya doing?"). After about 4-5 sentences, Duncan commented, "Notice something else Stephen is doing with contractions. When he says the '-ing' sound, it's contracted to 'en.' Instead of saying 'going,' he says 'goen'"! What a great moment! I really had to concentrate to read as formally as possible, but the Australian way took over. Fantastic to be in an Indonesian pronunciation class and to learn just how difficult and different Australian English is!

And the we got onto "wanna" and "gonna"! Students' heads must have been spinning!