174 Part III: Teaching Skills Classes
make the sound and what you do with them. For example, you can tell stu-
dents to put the tip of their tongue just behind the top of the upper teeth to
say /l/. Actually, you can point to the both parts of mouth to make the point.
Getting to know the 44 key sounds of English
Forty-four individual, recognised sounds make up the English language. These
are broken down into single vowels, double vowels and consonants. The
vowels allow the air to come straight out unobstructed by speech organs –
lips and teeth.
All the phonemes that include two marks like this are long sounds. For exam-
ple, compare ‘it’ /it/ and ‘eat’/it/. There’s a long sound in the second word.
The next sections cover the complete list of phonemes with examples.
Focusing on single vowel sounds
A vowel is a sound that comes out of the mouth without any of the speech
organs blocking the way. In other words you say them with an open mouth.
Single vowel sounds aren’t joined to any other vowel. In the next section I
focus on double vowel sounds.
Phoneme Examples
/i/ tree, easy, please
/i/ trip, is, synchronise
/u/ food, suit, moody
/υ/ put, wood, cook, look
/e/ extra, wedding, said
// early, word, furtive
/ə/ after, important, around
/ɔ/ more, war, awful, floor
/ɑ/ mask, car, afterwards and
// mat, plait, animal, wax
/ / under, cup, son, thud
/ɒ/ what, not, octopus, along
