Here are the phonemic chart for vowels and consonants. See a video explanation of the vowels here. Click on the jpegs below for either the colour or black and white versions. If you prefer a version with no mention of alcoholic drinks, choose the files with ME at the end of the title.
See a video of this talk here. Each language has a repertoire of sounds which are used to make meaningful distinctions. When teaching the sounds of English, we need to keep that practical purpose in mind.
I'm delighted to be presenting at TESOL Spain this year on the topic of pronunciation. This year, we'll be looking at individual sounds and things we and our students can do with them, including experimenting and imagining, representing and exploring, and playing and communicating.
(pdf of slides below) Proverbial wisdom tells us that if you give someone a fish, they can eat for a day, but if you teach someone to fish, they can eat for a lifetime. It’s a message about the long-term value of learning new skills and becoming independent. A similar thing could be said about pronunciation and dictionaries.
Authentic Listening Resource Pack (Delta Publishing, Jan 2015) provides an invaluable bank of selected audio and video material offering authentic listening practice, essential in developing students’ listening skills in preparation for being exposed to “real” English.
Think you heard it all? Think again! Expert listeners don't hear it all. They hear what's needed and disregard the 'noise'. But L2 listeners have to learn what counts as 'noise' in the target language. It’s not the ‘difficult’ words that present the biggest problem; it’s the ‘easy’ ones that are pronounced in unexpected ways.
Do you use the phonemic script in teaching? If you say, "It depends", what does it depend on? What are the pros and cons of the IPA? What kind of students does it help, and how does it help them? These are some of the issues broached in this paper.
