Is it a p,b,d,or q ?

I have found that these four letters are very difficult for new English language learners.  I want to call these letters the compass letters, because they are all the same shape, just facing four different directions: north, south, east, west; like a compass.  Nearly all of my students struggle with these letters, especially "q" as you don't see it often, and moving forward I'll want to develop (or find) some games or activities to help my students differentiate between these letters.  I'm sure that the solution is repetition with sight words for each of these letters, but I know that it must be frustrating for my students to constantly make mistakes with these letters.  For those of you struggling with this problem I would recommend making lists of sight words (commonly used words) for each letter and reviewing them often.  These sight words should mostly be words that can't be replaced by the the first letter of one of the other three letters, for example: "pickle" would be a great sight word because there's no such word as bickle, dickle, or qickle.  For "q" it's easy because you just have words that start with "qu": question, quit, quality, qualify, qualification.  For "b" words like battle and battalion would be great and for "d" words like doctor, drunk and distance.  Try to make lists with sight words for every letter and review these lists until you know just by looking at a letter if it is a b,p,d or q.  Give me some time and I'll try to find a fun game for this activity as well.  Good luck :-)

Learning English from a Native Speaker

People often ask me, "why is it so important to learn English from a native speaker?" My response is that non-native speakers often make grave mistakes in grammar and pronunciation that any native speaker could catch.  I'll just give a couple of examples from my own experience of teaching English here in Israel.

One of my students was answering every question in reading comprehension exercises with "because." When I asked him why he did this, he told me that he was instructed to do so by his teacher.  I then explained to my student that out of the five "w" questions (who, what, when, where and why) "because" would only be the appropriate beginning to answer a "why" question, and even then it's often not the best way to start a sentence.  Needless to say he was surprised that his teacher could have been so wrong, but this happens too often when learning English from a non-native speaker.

I had another student who mispronounced the vowel sound for the letter combination "ew".  Instead of pronouncing this combination like the long "u" sound (the sound that comes out when you say the letter "u") She would say an elongated "ee" followed by the "u" like in the word "feud." You may be saying to yourself that I'm super picky, but think about it like this: This student would say every word with the "ew" letter combination incorrectly.  I just did a quick Google search and I found this list: http://www.morewords.com/contains/ew/  which featured 1276, which my student would now be mispronouncing had I not corrected her.

I attribute both of these mistakes to the fact that my students are learning from non-native English speakers, and as a result are being conditioned to make serious mistakes.  That means more work for me to correct these mistakes, and I'll be happy to help anyone who needs it :-)