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Hints on Pronunciation for Foreigners - George Bernard Shaw
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Hints on pronunciation for foreigners
George Bernard Shaw
I take it you already know
of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead-it's said like bed, not bead.
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat.
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for pear and bear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose
Just look them up--and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward.
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Man alive,
I'd mastered it when I was five!
January 17, 2005
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Beginnings and Endings
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This is a simple warmer that can be used to recycle vocabulary. There are two basic versions: the spelling version and the sounds version.
Prepare a list of known words with each word written on a slip of paper.
Get the class to sit in a large circle. Start the warmer by choosing a student at random. Give them a word (for example, ‘elephant’ and ask them to repeat it.
The student next to them has to then find a word beginning with the last letter of the previous word. In this case an example might be ‘tiger’.
The next student then has to find a word beginning with ‘r’, and so on around the circle.
The game can be made more specific by focusing on a particular area of vocabulary such as animals, sports, countries and so on. It can also be played focusing on sounds rather than spelling. This is usually more difficult for the learners as it requires them to listen carefully and identify the final sound of each word.
By Tim Bowen
Source: http://www.onestopenglish.com/tefl_esl_warmers/beginning.htm
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January 17, 2005
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Pronunciation Help - Sentence Stress
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Take a look at the following list of stressed and non-stressed word types.
Basically, stress words are considered CONTENT WORDS such as
Nouns e.g. kitchen, Peter
(most) principle verbs e.g. visit, construct
Adjectives e.g. beautiful, interesting
Adverbs e.g. often, carefully
Non-stressed words are considered FUNCTION WORDS such as
Determiners e.g. the, a, some, a few
Auxiliary verbs e.g. don't, am, can, were
Prepositions e.g. before, next to, opposite
Conjunctions e.g. but, while, as
Pronouns e.g. they, she, us
Content or Function?
Write down 'C' for content and 'F' for function. When you have finished click on the arrow to see if you have answered correctly.
Example: magazine (C) as (F) many (F)
went
with
just
quickly
the
hard
next to
CD ROM
open
had
for
information
in order to
difficult
much
exacting
in front of
Jack
he
however
Identification and Practice
Mark the stressed words in the following sentences. After you have found the stressed words, practice reading the sentences aloud.
John is coming over tonight. We are going to work on our homework together.
Ecstasy is an extremely dangerous drug.
We should have visited some more castles while we were traveling through the back roads of France.
Jack bought a new car last Friday.
They are looking forward to your visiting them next January.
Exciting discoveries lie in Tom's future.
Would you like to come over and play a game of chess?
They have been having to work hard these last few months on their challenging experiment.
Shakespeare wrote passionate, moving poetry.
As you might have expected, he has just thought of a new approach to the problem.
Source: http://esl.about.com/library/lessons/blstress.htm
January 16, 2005
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Dramatic Dialogues
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This is a simple speaking activity you can utilise with any level, by simply varying the depth to which you exploit the students' responses. You simply take a selection of simple dialogues, such as
A: What is your name?
B: John Smith.
A: John Smith?
B: That’s right.
A: Ah. That explains everything.
You need about five or six for this to be successful. You could write them on the board if pushed for time, or elicit the conversations from the students as you go.
You then get the students to read them through in pairs, before deciding what the situation happens to be, and how the people might be feeling. You then do a feedback on the students ideas and focus on how each dialogue might sound. You then get the students to choose one dialogue and a situation and act it out, possibly extending it, while the other students guess what the situation is.
August 18, 2003
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Finding a relationship between spelling and pronunciation
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Intro
Put these words on the board and ask s’s what the pronunciation is:
night thought
right though
light through
fight cough
sight rough
might bough
Point out that they represent extremes of English. The first column follow a really consist pattern (i.e. “-igh” is pronounced /ai/) whereas the 2nd column is English at its most shambolic (i.e. all written “-ough”, all pronounced differently). Reassure them that in more cases than maybe they’d think there are patterns in the spelling of English and that whilst they may not be, in general, as exception free as the 1st column here English is rarely as completely bonkers as the 2nd column.
Predicting Sounds using students’ previous experience of English
Give s’s these words (deliberately chosen as s’s may not already be familiar with them)
grime peg slipper grind poach slime plight purge claim slate flirt brawl slay mud autistic lecture sty crew silage slit deed worship
and for each get them to think of 2 words which follow a similar spelling pattern (e.g. for “grime”: “mine” and “fine”) and hence predict the pronunciation of the word given, in this case /graim/.
Check as class.
Collect info to board
Give out board pens and make sure that by this point you have a large copy of the vowel parts of the phonemic chart on the board. Get students to write the letter combinations which produce a particular vowel in the appropriate part of the chart i.e. “-ee” would go in /i:/
Check. Discuss as class.
Brainstorm Game
Put group into teams. Get one student to stand up and throw a board pen at the phonemic chart on the board. The square it marks shows the chosen vowel sound. All teams have one and a half minutes to think of as many words as they can that feature the chosen vowel sound. The teams receive a point for every correct word but lose a point for every wrong word, which can be checked in whatever way, is most practical with your class. The winner is obviously the team with most points when the bell goes…
Hugh Cansdale, UK
April 11, 2003
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Phonemic Charts Online
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You can find a copy of the phonemic chart at the following web address:
www.teacher-training.net/companion/gg/misc/phonemicchart.htm This has explanations and “guide” words (although I still doubt the inclusion of “pure” as an example). A description of the ideas behind the chart can be found at http://www.teacherdevelopment.net/Books/introduction/sound-foundations-phonemic-chart.pdf. This is a selection of sample pages from Adrian Underhill’s excellent book on pronunciation teaching Sound Foundations.
Alternatively, you can make your own using this as a model. You may have a font already installed on your word processor, for example Andale Mono IPA. Look through the list on your word processor, especially for fonts containing the terms:“IPA” or “phonetic”. Alternatively, try this address: http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts/encore-ipa.html where you can download fonts to your PC for free. For Mac fonts try www.fontmagic.com/progs/p28.html )
Sam Shepherd
April 11, 2003
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A Rough Guide to the Phonemic Chart
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Warm-up Questions
In pairs; discuss these questions:
Is it easy to pronounce words in English? Why? What’s difficult?
If you see a word written down in English do you know how to pronounce it?
How many vowel sounds do you think there are in English? More or less than in your native language? (answer: 20)
Presentation
Give out copies of the phonemic chart and ask if they’re familiar with what it is. If not, explain that it represents all the different sounds which exist in the English language and point out the fact that if a student sees a word for the first time and doesn’t know how to pronounce it, any half decent dictionary will have phonetic renderings of words which will help them to do so.
Also explain the basic division; into monophthongs (or pure vowels) (top left 12 sounds), diphthongs (top right 8 sounds) and consonants (bottom 3 lines).
Pure vowels
1. Get s’s in pairs to go through the 12 pure vowels, looking at the example word and identifying the sound. Run through as class and check, drilling them and looking a little at the difference between, for example, /i/ and /i:/, /u/ and /u:/ (although obviously these are things that can be covered in future lessons in more depth so best not to get too bogged down here).
2. In pairs: try to think of 2 other words they know with the same vowel sound. In the mean time draw this part of the chart on the board (big). Give out board pens/chalk and get s’s to come up and write their words on the board in the appropriate places.
Check, discuss etc. You may want to highlight spelling patterns that emerge as they come up to combat the idea that English is complete anarchy (e.g. all words ending “-ight” have the sound /ai/ as have the majority of short words ending “i”-consonant- “e”). Obviously there’s a balance to be struck between getting side-tracked by this and missing the opportunity to point this type of thing out (the s’s may already be seeing patterns so this could be enforcing what they already have a bit of an instinct for rather than introducing something completely new) whilst the words are grouped on the board.
3. Give them a number of other words containing pure vowels to fit into the correct category. Check.
[Example words: thin, early, lot, brother, man, saw, two, three, ten, far, foot]
4. Discussion: In pairs: Which of these sounds exist in your language?
Which are most difficult for you to say?
Then have a brief feedback and make a note of problematic areas for focus in future classes.
Diphthongs
Run through the same process for the diphthongs, pointing out, too, how the diphthongs are logically composed of two pure vowels “squashed” together. Point out that the diphthong in “cure” is a disappearing sound, giving way to the pure vowel in four. Note that some of s’s native languages may not contain diphthongs.
[Example words for stage 3: allow, annoy, clear, high, chair, wait, throw]
Consonants Talk s’s through consonants, pointing out the pairing of unvoiced/voiced similar consonants in the 1st and 2nd lines. You could also divide them as follows:
- phonemes which are pronounced much as you’d expect from their appearance such as /t/ /k/ and so on;
- non-familiar symbols: for example, /θ/ /ð/ and /ŋ/
- and /j/ which is pronounced as “y” normally is when used as a consonant sound.
Stress It is also important to point out the little apostrophes which sit before stressed syllables announcing the stress.
NOTE: It is important to point out at some point that pronunciation of words in English is not an exact science and that words will vary in pronunciation depending on national, regional variations, whether the word is stressed or not within the sentence and so on.
Practice 1-Phonetic to normal
Put a number of words on the board or on a sheet written phonetically for them to recognise (try to include all the different phonemes and some ambiguous ones e.g. /red/ (“red” or “read” past forms of “read”)
Check.
[suggestions of words to write phonetically (the following list should contain all the phonemes): hat, book, table, school, France, Britain, lesson, joy, shutting, white, red/read, car, cars, problem, pure, burn, there/their/they’re, where/wear, we’re, no/know, now, church, favourite, would/wood, thought, this, these, weather/whether, sky, girls, radio, comfortable, Asia]
Practice 2-Normal to phonetic
Put a number of words on board or on a sheet written normally and get s’s to practice writing them phonetically.
Check.
[suggestions (the following list should contain all the phonemes): send, black, brown, enjoy, leave, should fight, tunnel, careless, ice, winners, confusion, interview, talking, jumper, biscuit, horse, Africa, television, father, heard, beer, away, window, accent, Europe, children]
Practice 3-Dictionary work and the usefulness of phonemes
Give them a number of words which are not easy to know how to pronounce when you look at the way they’re spelt (e.g.. “yacht”). Get them to look them up in the dictionary and then practice saying them.
[suggestions: yacht, dough, bough, trough, phlegm, buoy, pneumonia, ballet, chalet, sachet, buried, hegemony, misanthrope, victuals, endeavour, fortuitous, voracious, nought, aisle, eyrie, thorough, vociferous, xenophobe, gourmet, garage, controversy, homonym, plagiarism –in some cases more than one possible pronunciation may be found]
Hugh Cansdale, UK
April 11, 2003
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