How to learn English - Study tips from ELLLO

Speaking Tip #6 - Mimicking

Learn how to work on pronunciation with the drilling task.

Try it yourself! Play the audio and see if you can do it.

Hello everybody, hi. This is Todd the teacher from ELLLO, and we are on speaking tip number six. And this is for the questions - we are going to, actually, just practice repeating the questions and we're gonna practice pitch, or intonation, so we having rising and falling intonation. And, also, speaking in chunks. So, we want to speak fluently and naturally, and we want our words to flow. So, we are going to practice just repeating the questions - that's it - but we really want to mimic, or copy, the intonation. So, what I will do is play the audio and, after each question, I will repeat it, but I really want to listen for the intonation, the rhythm of the question. So, here we go.

'Level two, lesson number six: can abilities. You will hear five questions using 'can' to express abilities. You have eight seconds to answer or repeat each question. One: what foods can you cook?'

'What foods can you cook?', 'What foods can you cook?'

'Two: what sports can you play?'

'What sports can you play?', 'What sports can you play?'

'Three: can you play a musical instrument?'

'Can you play a musical instrument?'

'Four: what languages do you speak?'

'What languages do you speak?', 'What languages do you speak?'

'Five: can you change a car tire?'

'Can you change a car tire?'

'That ends the lesson. Thanks for participating.'

So, again, in this activity you're just working on intonation, but you're also working on chunking - saying things kind of grouped together - on word stress, and having a nice flow to your English. So, repetition, actually, is good - it's something that you should practice. And not just repeating the words, but you wanna listen to the intonation, the words stressed, how words are grouped together, etcetera. And that's it - that's speaking tip number six.


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