Hello This is Oral Communication for EFL Learners I am Yangfang from Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures Tsinghua University The topic of Unit 2 is People in your life
In this unit we'll talk about how to get along with our family and friends Just now
Glenn has introduced the whole unit and I will work together with Tom to explain the main text you will read
aloud with Tom and while you listen to him Please think about two questions First Why does she think her mother is her best friend Second in your life Do you get along well with your parents Hello Tom again
and in Today's lecture We are going to read the text first afterwards follow me sentence by sentence
You may want to read the text again until you feel comfortable about paraphrasing the main ideas in the text in English Let’s begin! My mother is my best friend and I can talk to her about anything
She helps me through everything and we don't have any secrets Whenever I feel lonely my mother is the only person I can talk to My mother has been my best friend for as long as I can remember
and I prefer her company over anyone else She is kind intelligent funny and a good listener I can say without bias that I've never met another person more worth being friends with Sure I’ve had friends but I just liked my mom more than them I didn't feel the need to go shopping with my friends
and I've kept contact with hardly anyone from those years of my life To this day I tend to
relate better to people decades older than me I have given my mother so much access to me
that it is difficult to be myself My friends told me that I'm living in a house without walls – emotional walls.
At 25 I am only now learning how to make and maintain friendships outside of my family circle
Feeling that my mom doesn't understand my life has encouraged me to develop a new circle of friends
that has nothing to do with her It helped me to keep some things private from her
I started setting boundaries For example my mother doesn't know what music I'm listening to
I still feel the urge to tell her but now there's a voice in the back of my head that reminds me some things
need to be mine and only mine By nature of being a great best friend and parent
my mom understands and accepts this I hope it's a compliment to my mother that her role in my life
has always been too comforting and too loving so much that I had to start keeping a distance
from her Now I want you to read after me sentence by sentence You may want to do this more than twice
to make sure that you understand Now I would like to explain a few words and expressions
Don’t worry if you don’t understand my Chinese colleagues will explain more in Chinese
emotional walls You know what a real wall is made of brick or wood But an emotional wall is a barrier in our lives that is built by our emotions how we feel about things.
close circle of friends Imagine a big group of people in a circle If they are all surrounding you they are your circle all facing their attentions towards you They are your close circle of friends And this may only be five or six people or maybe even only one There's a voice
in the back of my head We all know that inside our heads we have a voice telling us
of our thoughts and our feelings So when you say there’s a voice at the back of my head
this means that you’re thinking aloud inside your head and you can hear it almost After reading after Tom
You must have known that why her mother is her best friend if not
you may go back to the video and study with Tom one more time also Tom has explained 3 expressions
I’m sure some of you would like to know more about other vocabularies and expressions
I would explain these vocabularies and expressions in details and talk about how to use these expressions
in the next video
