Week 9 -’Tween test times July 7, 2010
Posted by Liz Mead in : TESOL , trackbackCaptain’s Log: Midshipman Suprasegmental shot an albatross yesterday. The feeling of fear in the crew is palpable.
It’s the lead up to a TESOL test
A quiz, a trial that needs my best
But all I’ve got is mild distress.
The time invested studying
Has only worked at muddying
This addled brain of mine.
My skin in the game isn’t Wall Street inflated
It’s more like a ball of potential deflated.
So now when my rubber
is hitting the road,
Assessment is stymied
by mind-bending loads.
I’d decided to write upon my sleeve
when lo –there came a day’s reprieve.
so….
As English is stress-timed
and meaning is made
with focus on key words
once rhythm is laid.
A rhyming verse
Would do me well
To practice my phonemes
And suprasegme’ls.
Alas this mess of homophones
Is surely not a verse
But crafting it ‘tween test times
Has hardly made it worse!
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Comments»
Well there you are – it wasn’t all that bad, was it? The phonology assessment, I mean. I know it can all seem a bit intimidating – all those new concepts and things – but, as a native English speaker, you have actually been adding meaning and interpreting meaning from others through all those little twiddles and twaddles of stress and intonation for most of your life, and the whole process of recognising those things and giving them labels is just part of the process of enabling us to pass on some of those skills to others.
Ah but I’m sure you already know all that. You’re so open to exploring unfamiliar concepts and have been for every one of these past 9 weeks that you don’t eally need me to tell you that. You’re really just talking about getting in a tizzy about the fact that it was a sort of test, I guess and in the event that was…. well, it wasn’t all that bad, was it?
Now you leave those poor albatrosses alone – in fact, why not celebrate your success by flinging them a few toast crumbs?