Shannon is a board certified Speech Pathologist from the USA. He has experience with all ages and is able to use his knowledge to help people on many levels of communication.
Shannon Reaves MS CCC
Speech Language Pathologist
English Fluency and Job Growth
A recent study on 38 countries by Cambridge English stated that employees in countries like China and Brazil who are fluent in English have better salary packages and promotions than non English speakers.
Scope of Learning
Learning a second language is difficult, time consuming and outright boring with the wrong direction. It is imperative to find a teacher that can inspire, be receptive to goals, and provide an outline to success.
Below are some areas that are targeted for optimal communication.
Fluency is a lot of times, when learning a second language, used to describe how fluent someone is in the language being learned. Being fluent, is when someone is able to express, read and comprehend natural speech at a specific appropriate level.
However, when working on speech specifically, fluency is the smoothness of all the sounds, syllables and phrases that work together in conversation. To put it into perspective, a dysfluency or example of a fluency disorder would be stuttering or some type of interruption in the smoothness of the speech.
ESL learners can have many dysfluencies from adding sounds ( vowels – epenthesis ) or just sometimes speaking too fast or prolonging sounds and syllables when not needed.
Structure is simply the word order of a sentence. This is almost always a difficult area to learn for language learners in Asia vs the West and vice versa.
For example, when looking at comparing English to most languages in Asia, the adjectives will come before the noun in English and there are many different or additional word traits such as articles and prepositions that are not in native languages of Asia. This can be confusing when trying to figure out where to place the words in the sentence.
Lets look at some sentences in Thai vs English.
“Where is the bathroom?”
“ห้องน้ำอยู่ที่ไหน” = “Hongnam yu tinai ” = “Bathroom stay where?
As you can see, the sentence is more simple ( missing article “the” ) and words are in a different order which can be confusing.
Let’s look at another example with adjectives.
“I want a cold beer”
ฉันต้องการเบียร์เย็น = chan tongkan bier yen = I want beer cold
