AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this
week on Wordmaster: we talk with English teacher Nina Weinstein about
some expressions in spoken American English that you might not find in a
dictionary.
RS: But if you are a good listener, you'll hear them. They give
people time to think while helping connect one thought to the next.
NINA WEINSTEIN: "One of the useful links, I think, is the expression 'let's see,' which means 'let me think.' Often my students will use a kind of word like that from their own language. And so they'll be speaking Japanese or Spanish or whatever with their linking word and THEN they'll continue the rest of the sentence in English. And so I give them 'let's see' as a way to bridge their thoughts and also give them time to think."
AA: "'Let's see' also has a meaning in itself, though, too, doesn't
it? Where, for example, you're not sure which way you've decided on
something so you'll say 'OK, let's see' -- let's see what happens.
'Let's see.'"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "I think you're right. I think it could indicate that
you're not sure of the answer. It has a lot of meanings. And a lot of
these have dual meanings, like the simple expression 'uh huh.' Uh huh
can mean that we're listening to what the person is saying, so this is a
way of keeping them talking. It can also mean yes, or it can be
pronounced 'um hmm.'"
RS: "What about no?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "'Unh unh.' And my students often have a problem distinguishing between uh huh and unh unh."
AA: "Give us an example of how to use them correctly."
NINA WEINSTEIN: "'Do you want to go to the movie?' 'Uh huh.' Do you think that the movie will start after nine?' 'Unh unh.'"
RS: "You say your students have trouble distinguishing between the two?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "Right."
RS: "Now, do you reinforce them with facial expressions or shaking
your head, or nodding your head [yes] or shaking your head no?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "I talk about the beat. If you listen to 'uh huh,'
the accent is on the second syllable. If you listen to 'unh unh,' it's
equal. So 'unh unh' is more staccato. And I tap my hand on the desk to
kind of reinforce this. And then I usually asked them if they sing
karaoke or something like that, so they get the idea of the beat. But I
don't sing for them!"
AA: "Unh unh."
RS: "So you give them a couple of examples and they're tapping out on their desk whether it's yes or no?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "Exactly."
RS: "I want to go back to unh unh, uh huh and a third one, 'uh oh.'"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "Uh oh."
RS: "They sound very similar. We have three here and if you could go
over them again for us, I think that would be very useful because they
sound so similar, but they're used in such different contexts."
NINA WEINSTEIN: "Well, I think if we look at the rest of the sentence
or listen to the rest of the sentence, that gives us a big clue. If
someone asks a question and the answer is uh huh, then it has to be
either yes or no, so that pretty much narrows it. If there's a situation
-- for instance, if a person spills some coffee or something like that,
and the person says 'uh oh,' I think there's a kind of feeling that the
situation gives us that something bad has happened, and uh oh means 'oh
no,' there's a problem, something bad has happened, there's trouble or
something like that. So often the situation will give us the idea."
AA: "It's a synonym for 'oops,' right?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "It can be oops. We also say 'whoops.'"
AA: "What about a word like 'hey'?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "Hey is actually a conversational strategy and it's
used to draw attention to what you're talking about: 'Hey, did you see
the movie on Channel 3 last week?' So I can delete the hey and still
have a good sentence, but hey adds a kind of attention focus to the
sentence."
RS: "What would you suggest to do to teach these things? Is it just to listen a lot?"
NINA WEINSTEIN: "I think that often what I read in the literature is a
kind of lumping together of all of these strategies. But just in what
we've spoken about today, you can see that they're very complicated, or
they can have multi-purposes, each one. So I think that we need to give
students systematic practice in hearing them and in distinguishing when
the differences can be confusing, such as uh huh/unh unh."
AA: Nina Weinstein is an English teacher in Southern California and
author of the book "Whaddaya Say? Guided Practice in Relaxed Speech."
She's put together a list of conversational strategies including the
ones we talked about today, which we'll post on our Web site,
voanews.com/wordmaster.
RS: And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.
MUSIC: "Uh Huh Oh Yeh"/Paul Weller.
(Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)
0 Comment "Expressions in spoken American English"
Đăng nhận xét