In the Pronunciation Class

Today, I went to a Pronunciation practise class organised by our University (University of Wollongong) for International students. There were approximately 20 students from different countries. There were maximum number of students from China as compared to other countries. Other countries include China, Japan, Indonesia, Spain, India, Thailand, Arabia and Bhutan. This workshop is designed to help students speak more clearly and fluently while communicating in the class with other students.

Firstly, lecturer wanted to refresh our mind and she asked, "How do you like to speak English?" Most of the student excitingly replied, “I want to speak like a native people” I smiled to their answer because I know I can never speak like them. In contrary to this, I responded, “I want native speaker to understand my English" I don’t think I have a pronunciation problem although I don’t pronounce like the native speakers do. So yeah, I just stumbled upon this option and lecturer continued by telling us that all of us have a different opinion to how we want to speak English

As a practical exercise in the class, there were various tongue twisters listed in our handouts. It read, “Red Lorry, yellow lorry”, “Rick Richard regularly read Red Riding Hood in his Rolls Royce” and the last one read, “Betty bought a pound of butter, but the butter was bitter, so Betty bought another pound of butter to make the bitter butter better. But, the bitter butter made the better butter bitter”

As soon as I saw the third tongue twister, my black and white high school returned to present. As high school students, we didn’t really care about such tongue twister as an exercise to pronounce properly but we loved to imitate those beautiful words and then constantly compete with our friends. No wonder Bhutanese don't find difficult to pronounce the words. Wink*

Then the lecturer asked us to speak out the tongue twisters for the class. So I read the third one because I was excited and at the same time I wanted to bring my high memories back and feel the difference. My high school work came in handy in front of other students. SHould I say I had the most memorable day of my life? :)

After reading it to the class, I felt so relieved and relaxed and at the same time, I felt happy. Weird! Then the respond from the crowd of students and the lecturer almost had me blushed. All of them at once retorted, "WOOOWWWWW” followed by an applause. they were impressed.

The pronunciation class was so fun and for the first time in this 4 week of my University, I felt active and happy. This pronunciation activity helped me to connect with international students and at the same time, it led me to experience how other students have difficulty in pronouncing the words.