Teaching Diphthongs It’s never easy to teach phonetics and even though I love teaching this skill, I don’t think my students share my feelings on this subject. Anyway,in case you find it interesting or useful this is how I’m planning to teach diphthongs . A diphthong is a sound made up of two vowels, or in other words ,a vowel sound that starts near the articulatory position for one vowel and moves toward the position for another.In RP (the approved pronunciation of British English) , there are eight diphthongs. An easy way for them to remember the diphthongs is by drawing a face such as this one and then eliciting the diphthongs in the head. You’ll get seven out of the eight diphthongs as you can see from the picture .
Custom Production Music and also Graph Paper Sorry, Russia… For the last few days, I’ve been having problems with some very aggressive search engine robots from Yandex. It looks like a Russian search engine, and while I would like to be listed, my site can’t take the hit of hundreds of requests a second that they were sending at me… looks like many many many requests for the same audio files over and over again. If you had issues with this site over the last couple of days – it should be all fixed now! You've Been Saying These Country And City Names Wrong Your Whole Life No one wants to be labeled as a gawking, uninformed foreigner. Aside from wearing a fanny pack, one of the fastest ways to get yourself labeled as a tourist is to mispronounce the name of the city you are visiting. However, in defense of all those who confuse the proper pronunciation of Ibiza for a seriously strong lisp, learning the proper names of all the places in the world can be a tricky task. Let’s face it, spelling can be deceiving, especially if it’s in a language you don’t know how to speak.
Ceri Jones - Pronunciation: focusing on sounds from day one For the last couple of years I’ve been teaching the Unknown Language component of the Trinity TESOL certificate course. This basically entails teaching four hours of a new language to the trainees in the initial stage of their course to give them a taste of what it feels like to be in a language classroom. I teach Welsh. Royals (Lorde) –[Multimedia-English videos] This was named the Best Song of 2013 by MTV News. MTV said: "She may never be 'royal,' but Lorde's chart-topping single will forever be enthroned in the collective cerebral cortex of the world." Ella Yelich-O'Connor is a New Zealand singer-songwriter. Inspired by her love for such royals as Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI of France, and the last Tsar, Nicholas II of Russia, she adopted the moniker of Lorde (The 'e' is pronounced silently). This song eschews an intro and starts right in with the verse "I've never seen a diamond in the flesh...". Since the song tells a story, this is a great technique for hooking the listener.
Sandy Millin: Advanced pronunciation I have regularly taught advanced students who are extremely competent speakers, have a very wide vocabulary and a good knowledge of grammatical structures, but who have trouble understanding when native speakers produce fast speech. This was a particular problem when I was teaching in the UK, where some of my students were reluctant to speak to people in the streets when we did tasks such as interviews, as they were worried they wouldn’t understand and would have to keep asking for their interviewee to repeat themselves. To combat this fear and to improve students’ confidence, I think it’s important to focus on the features of connected speech with our students as early as possible. I’ve noticed that many of my students are unaware of features such as: Elision: the ‘loss’ of sounds. For example, the middle ‘e’ disappearing from ‘vegetable’, or ‘d’ disappearing in ‘black and white’.Intrusion: the ‘addition’ of sounds, following a predictable pattern.
The most difficult words to pronounce in the English language revealed – as well as the world’s favourite English tongue-twisters “Worcestershire”. “Choir”. “Sixth”. For some, these words may seem relatively normal and everyday – but to others, they represent an unrivalled linguistic challenge. Pronunciation skills: What accent should I teach? By Adrian Underhill ELT Pronunciation expert Adrian Underhill addresses your practical concerns on accents, RP and student identity. Practical concerns What accent should I teach?I suggest you teach your own accent. Whether you are a native or non-native speaker, teach the accent that you speak. 18 English words that mean very different things in Britain and America As the old adage famously goes: you say tom-MAY-toes, and I say tom-MAH-toes. We should probably call the whole thing off, right? Ever since the might of the British Empire was expelled from the United States, ordinary folk from both sides of the pond have chuckled at each other's use of the English language and pronunciation. Here are several important examples you need to remember - simply to make sure no one gives you a weird look when you're off on your holidays. 1. A jumper