Make your English softer

Everyone's been asking if I had fun at the IATEFL conference last week. Fun? Eamonn asked me whether there were any good parties. Parties? I was at a teaching conference, not at the MTV Awards! Hello? Actually, I did go to two — well, three — wine and cake events, but there wasn't enough wine to get even mildly tipsy, and no strippers jumped out of the cakes either. Shame. But it was interesting. No, really.

One of the most interesting sessions was presented by Mario Rinvolucri, teacher trainer extraordinaire and author of the fantastic teacher resource book Grammar Games. The presentation was called "A methodology for teaching spoken English".

Mario asked whether teachers are making the difference between spoken and written English clear to learners. Or are we teaching learners to speak "'EFLese' — an odd dialect only spoken by EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers?" Using the work of Ron Carter and Michael McCarthy, Mario demonstrated exercises for teaching spoken English. In one of them, he asked us to write down the following:

Gordon Brown hopes Barack Obama's charisma will rub off on him. He wants to avoid losing the next UK election, a defeat that at the moment seems likely. Obama is aware that other leaders will use him for their own ends.

Then Mario gave us a list of softeners normally heard in spoken English:

and asked us to put some of these into the paragraph he had dictated to us. You can try this yourself. This is what I came up with:

Gordon Brown probably hopes Barack Obama's charisma will sort of rub off on him. I suspect he really wants to avoid losing the next UK election, a defeat that at the moment seems kind of likely. I guess Obama is somehow aware that other leaders will try to use him for their own ends.

Spot the difference? The statement sounds a lot softer now and is much more like spoken English. Kind of interesting, don't you think?