176 Part III: Teaching Skills Classes
Phoneme Examples
/p/ politics, happy, up
/b/ bubble, burn, cab
/t/ doubt, theatre, tight
/d/ did, wooden, mud
/tʃ/ cheese, rich, cheap
/d/ judge, page, general
/k/ cook, chemistry, bike
/ / good, wiggle, big
/v/ visit, stove, voice
/f/ photo, off, wife
/θ/ thumb, thirst, bath
/ð/ this, either, father
/s/ psychology, nice, scent
/z/ wise, jazz, phase
/ʃ/ sugar, shoot, machine
// measure, visual, decision
Many of the consonant phonemes are paired – voiced and unvoiced. If you
were lip reading you’d probably have trouble distinguishing /p/ and /b/, for
example, because they both involve the same speech organs (upper and lower
lips). However when you put your hand on your larynx (where the adam’s
apple is on a man’s neck) and say them aloud, you can feel that voiced /b/
makes it vibrate a lot, whereas unvoiced /p/ does not. So a voiced consonant
is a sound that makes the vocal chords vibrate when you say it, whereas
there’s no vibration of the vocal chords when you say an unvoiced consonant.
Phoneme Examples
/m/ numb, mystery, mime, autumn
/n/ now, vain, gnome, knees
/ŋ/ think, language, singer, wrinkle
/h/ hospital, hairstyle, hello, hamster
/l/ lessons, wheel, leaf, subtle
/r/ romance, bearer, robin, wrong
/w/ watch, fewer, weed, wasp
/j/ yellow, layer, yesterday, yam
