Understanding and Teaching the Pronunciation of English.pdf

sound to a di"erent position too. We say that these two allophones are in complementary distribution. That means we can predict ...

the words really sound like. It’s important to encourage students to hear and produce the sounds of a new language as they reall ...

The phonemic alphabet A phonemic alphabet is a set of symbols that represent the sounds of a language. One symbol represents exa ...

car, not the vowels in cat, cake, or care. Those have their own symbols. Other phonemic symbols, like /ə/, /θ/, and /ŋ/, are not ...

The symbols used in this book are like those used in many American ESL textbooks, and are in the Charis SIL font. Should you use ...

form of a language that is associated with a particular country, region, or social group. When linguists use the term “dialect,” ...

like the rules that tell you that you can’t touch the ball with your hands when you’re playing soccer, or that you have to drive ...

and they’re always in a state of change. Linguists do their best to analyze this amazing mess, but rules often have exceptions, ...

CHAPTER 3 The Articulatory System How do we produce sounds? Think for a minute about what happens when we talk. Say a few words ...

stretched tight and close together, air passing through them makes them vibrate rapidly—more than 100 times per second —and the ...

The soft palate is the softer part of the roof of the mouth, farther back than the hard palate. It is also called the velum. If ...

the teacher’s mouth. (It’s dark in there!) We’ll talk more about using a dental model in Chapter 7. Diagrams of the vocal tract ...

allowed by your school.) For the /s/ sounds, ask them to make a sound like a hissing snake. Internet links An x-ray video of a ...

CHAPTER 4 The Consonants of American English How do we describe consonants? Consonants are sounds in which the air stream meets ...

contain one consonant sound, play contains two, and spring contains four. (Remember that we’re counting the consonant sounds, no ...

Place of articulation (Where?) We can also classify consonants by referring to the parts of the articulatory system that are act ...

listed below. The same information is summarized in the chart in Box 4.14. Stops^ (also called plosives): The air stream is blo ...

manner. The liquid sounds in English are /l/ and /r/. Glides^ (also called semivowels):^ A glide is like a very quick vowel. Th ...

areas, some speakers may di"erentiate /w/ and /hw/, but most people don’t. For pronunciation teaching purposes, it’s not necessa ...

allophone, depending on their phonetic environment.) Let’s look at the consonant variations in American English that are most im ...