Pronunciation & Phonetics

TEA meeting – 10th April 2013

Adrian Underhill’s Phonemic Chart

All rights A Underhill

New English File Phonemic Chart

All rights OUP

Using minimal pairs (identifying sounds)

• Keep a note of your own minimal pairs or, like me, let someone else do it…! http://www.tinyteflteacher.co.uk/teacher/pronunciation/minimalpairs.html (also has a list of quick, fun and easy minimal pair activities)

• Then make flashcards for the words

Example activities

• Phonetic corners• Pronunciation journey - Elicit and drill minimal pairs using the sound you want to focus on. For example ‘ship’/’sheep’ for long/short vowel- Then give out the pronunciation map. Choose a word from the pairs and explain that if the students hear ‘ee’ they go left, for example and if they hear ‘i’ they go right

Possible pairs

Pronunciation map

Sound maze

A nice variation is to make a template and have the students create their own mazes. From experience, this exercise works well if you give a vocabulary theme eg sport, food, clothes, adjectives etc

The Schwa

• Have part of a lesson writing a limerick – or just lines. This is useful for showing the schwa

• Examples for ‘scaffolding’ There was a young man from……(where?)Who ……(what did he do?)

• http://www.gigglepoetry.com/poetryclass/limerickcontesthelp.html

Useful sites/links

• Adrian Underhill pronunciation workshop: Extremely informative video, this is the full length one, but you can find shorter clips on youtube http://youtu.be/1kAPHyHd7Lo

• http://www.tinyteflteacher.co.uk/teacher/pronunciation.html Really nice worksheets and activities, easy to use

• http://www.acapela-group.com/text-to-speech-interactive-demo.html This site converts text to speech. Get the students to write something, they pronounce it, then compare their pronunciation to the computers

Useful sites/links cont’d…

• http://davidbrett.uniss.it/phonology/ Not very user friendly, but has some nice exercises. A bit on the academic side.

• http://elt.oup.com/student/englishfile/?cc=fr&selLanguage=en English File website – each level has a section with games for pronunctaion. On the downside they’re a little on the short side and can be repetitive. Good for reviewing though.