English Tongue Twisters for ESL Students

English Tongue Twisters for ESL Students Tongue twisters are short, memorable lines that are difficult to pronounce, especially rapidly, because of alliteration or a slight variation of consonant sounds, and are especially useful in pronunciation when focusing on related phonemes, or sounds. In other words, there are several s sounds such as sh, z and tch, and a tongue twister focuses on the minor changes in the mouth required to move between these sounds. By changing back and forth a number of times to the different sounds, students can improve their knowledge of the specific physical movements required for that particular phoneme set. Learning a tongue twister employs musical intelligence, which is one of the multiple intelligences of learners. Another example of this type of learning includes grammar chants. These types of exercises  build up muscle memory related to speech, making it easier to recall later. Fun but Not Necessarily Accurate Tongue twisters are lots of fun, but they often dont make much sense, so its important to warn students before introducing them to tongue twisters that theyre not meant to be learning guides for using proper grammar. Rather, they should be used for exercising pronunciation muscles. For instance, in the old nursery rhyme tongue twister called Peter Piper, the content of the story may make sense in terms of narrative, but the phrase Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, doesnt actually work because you cannot pick already pickled peppers. Similarly, in Woodchuck, the speaker asks how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood, which would make sense if only woodchucks didnt chuck wood with their teeth. For this reason, when introducing an ESL student to English tongue twisters, its doubly important to go over what the limericks mean in the context of the piece as well as in the context of the words on their own, paying special attention to common idioms that dont make sense when directly translated to a foreign language. Practice Makes Perfect A very large part of understanding how to speak a foreign language properly comes in understanding how the muscles of the mouth are meant to move to elicit certain  sounds and pronunciations- thats why tongue twisters are so handy in teaching ESL students to speak English correctly and quickly. Because tongue twisters consists of so many slight variations on the same sound, all of which are used colloquially in American English, the ESL learner is able to get a clear grasp of how pen sounds different from pin or pan, despite sharing a majority of the same letters and consonant  sounds. In the poem Sally Sells Sea Shells by the Sea Shore, for instance, the speaker is able to go through every variation of the s sound in English, learning the difference between sh and s as well as z and tch. Similarly, ​Betty Botter and A Flea and a Fly walk the speaker through all the b and f sounds.

Java Events and How They Work With Event Listeners

Java Events and How They Work With Event Listeners An event in Java is an object that is created when something changes within a graphical user interface. If a user clicks on a button, clicks on a combo box, or types characters into a text field, etc., then an event triggers, creating the relevant event object. This behavior is part of Javas Event Handling mechanism and is included in the Swing GUI library.   For example, lets say we have  a JButton. If a user clicks on  the  JButton,  a  button click event is triggered, the event will be created, and it will be sent to the relevant event listener (in this case, the ActionListener). The relevant listener will have implemented code that determines the action to take when the event occurs.   Note that an event source must be paired with an event listener, or its triggering will result in no action. How Events Work Event handling in Java is comprised of two key elements: The event source, which is an object that is created when an event occurs. Java provides several types of these event sources, discussed in the section Types of Events below.The event listener, the object that listens for events and processes them when they occur. There are several types of events and listeners in Java: each type of event is tied to a corresponding listener. For this discussion, lets consider a common type of event, an action event represented by the Java class ActionEvent, which is triggered when a user clicks a button or the item of a list.   At the users action, an ActionEvent object corresponding to the relevant action is created. This object contains both the event source information and the specific action taken by the user. This event object is then passed to the corresponding ActionListener objects method:   Ã¢â‚¬â€¹void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) This method is executed and returns the appropriate GUI response, which might be to  open or close a dialog, download a file, provide a digital signature, or any other of the myriad actions available to users in an interface. Types of Events Here are some of the most common types of events in Java: ActionEvent: Represents a graphical element is clicked, such as a button or item in a list. Related listener:  ActionListener.ContainerEvent: Represents an event that occurs to the GUIs container itself, for example, if a user adds or removes an object from the interface.  Related listener:  ContainerListener.KeyEvent: Represents an event in which the user presses, types or releases a key.  Related listener:  KeyListener.WindowEvent: Represents an event relating to a window, for example, when a window is closed, activated or deactivated.  Related listener:  WindowListener.MouseEvent: Represents any event related to a mouse, such as when a mouse is clicked or pressed.  Related listener:  MouseListener. Note that multiple listeners and event sources can interact with one another. For example, multiple events can be registered by a single listener, if they are of the same type. This means that, for a similar set of components that perform the same type of action, one event listener can handle all the events. Similarly, a single event can be bound to multiple listeners, if that suits the programs design (although that is less common).