Define Phonetic Alphabet

  There are two issues that need to be stressed when working with the international phonemic alphabet. First is the fact that we are no longer concerned with how a word is traditionally spelled. Additionally we need to stress that we are only concerned with the sounds needed to correctly produce a word. So rather than numerous spellings, which can often be pronounced in different ways, we have one symbol representing one sound. Once we can isolate a sound, rather than juggling various spellings, we can work with our students on how to say that sound. Doing that successfully is related to manner and place of articulation, which will be covered shortly. To get a better understanding of the phonemic alphabet, let's take a look at our chart. In the bottom half of our chart we have our...  [Read more]

Also referred to as the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet was developed to be used across all languages. By breaking down all speech into individual sounds common across all languages it is possible to represent words by the phonemic symbols they employ.  [Read more]

  A better way to go about imparting how to make sounds or what sounds are utilized in a word, is this international phonemic alphabet. Now we have as mentioned one symbol being used in all the words which share that same sound. Now once we get a little bit more familiar with our phonemic alphabet we can also show how different our different sounds can be as in this symbol for ?ooh?, this symbol for ?ow? and this symbol for ?uh?. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the...  [Read more]

Phonetics and TESOL Phonetics, the study of the sounds of human speech, and in particular “Articulatory Phonetics”, are not commonly taught to native speakers of English, let alone learners of English as a second language. However if the learner is serious with their English and wish to progress to an advanced level, learning phonetics, in particular the International Phonetic Alphabet, would be of immense benefit. English spelling is often contradictory, devoid of relation to the pronunciation of a word, and lacking in clear patterns. Patterns that do exist are numerous, with a large number of exceptions, and all of this makes it very difficult for the learner of English as a second language to master pronunciation. The International Phonetic Alphabet puts all of the individual...  [Read more]

  In this video we'll be looking at the international phonemic alphabet and how it's used in the classroom. There are other phonemic alphabets but this is the most popular and the system, which is most widely used. You may have seen some of these symbols before as any good dictionary will supplement standard English spellings with the phonemic spellings to aid in pronunciation practice. Here we have a situation where we have what are called phonemes and each phoneme represents a sound within the English language. How is this helpful? Well, what it does is help students understand how to say words rather than simply relying on the often archaic English spellings. To illustrate this point let's for a moment put ourselves in the shoes of our students when trying to understand how to...  [Read more]

  The next example is going to be that of a boomerang lesson and remember the structure is like this. So, again, we're going to start with an engage phase and for our engage, the students are just going to have a discussion about jobs. What happens at interviews and so on and so forth. So, during that engage phase, what we'd hope to do is to elicit some useful language about jobs and interviews and the types of questions that are being asked. Then, we're going to move immediately into an activate activity and this is going to involve a role-play. So, we'll break the students into pairs. One will be an interviewer, the other will be an interviewee and they'll generate the language that that role-play will produce. What the teacher can do whilst that is taking place is to go around...  [Read more]

  Before looking at the methods or approaches themselves, there are some terms that we need to define. These are the approach, the method or the technique. Basically, these are hierarchical. The approach is an overriding set of principles that a method can actually make use of, whereas the technique are the things that we actually do in the classroom to approach that method. So, these three words are going to appear during the presentation. Again, for each of either the approaches all the methodologies we're going to ask four questions. So be it an approach or a method for each of those things: Where did it come from? What's its background? What does it involve when we're talking about actually in the classroom, in other words techniques? What is positive about it? What appears to...  [Read more]

  Now let's take a look at how we go from traditional spellings into the phonemic spellings. The first step in this process is identifying each unit of sound or each phoneme within a word. Let's look at bet, bit, but, and bought. The only difference in each one of these words is in the vowel sound. We have bet, bit, but and bought. Each word simply uses three sounds. Now we have photo. That's four phonemes. Wow we have taxi. That's five phonemes. We have unite with a hidden phoneme in there being the ?y? sound before anything else. Those are five phonemes as well and now we have a longer word: chemistry. Let's give that a shot. That's eight phonemes used in the word chemistry. Now once we've isolated each sound we want to assign a phoneme for each one of those sounds let's do that...  [Read more]

  And now we have our nasal sounds. There are three nasal sounds and basically the pattern of air that's moving out of our vocal tract has to do with two big instances and that is a closure in the vocal tract. Except aside from the plosives and affricates, what we have is air escaping through our nasal cavity. These sounds include ?m?, ?n? and ?ng?. We're moving from the front of the mouth to the back of the mouth. First with the M sound or the ?m?, we're closing both lips and the air is escaping through the nasal passage ?m?. Next we have our N sound or our ?n? sound. There, the closure is inside the mouth but our tongue is closing up near our alveolar ridge and the air is escaping through the nose. Again that's ?n?. Finally we have our NG sound and the closure there is happening...  [Read more]

  In this video we explain the difference in using "amount" and "number". The word "amount" is used when we want to refer to uncountable commodities such as water, electricity, money etc. Whereas, "number" is used to refer to individual things that are countable such as book, cat, chair etc. In the example "a greater amount of people are going to the gym" the use of "amount" is incorrect because we can count "people". In this case "number" needs to be used. A good example of the use of "amount" is "a greater amount of rain came down in November compared to October". Here "rain" is uncountable so "amount" should be used. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into...  [Read more]

  There are many different types of groups of students that you will encounter when teaching English as a foreign language. This video introduces you to the five different types of student groups. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. This unit helps me identify the different ways of evaluating and assessing students' level. The several tests at different stages. The importance of placement test and diagnostic test. It is also very necessary to often...  [Read more]

  In this video we explain the difference in using "bad" and "badly". The key difference is that 'bad' is used as an adjective and 'badly' as an adverb. Therfore, 'bad' describes that something is not good, while 'badly' refers to something that is done in a bad manner, harmfully or in correctly. A good example sentence for 'bad' would be "Jenny had a car accident today. This is bad". Let's look at an example for 'badly': "Austin behaved badly". I'm sure you'll never confuse the two words again. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that...  [Read more]

  As mentioned before our four words here all are similar in using the 'b' and 't' sounds at the end. So we know that those phonemes will be used in spelling each one of those words phonetically. Now what we're left to do is assign a phoneme for our vowel sounds. So if we analyze the word, it's 'e' as in bet. We look at our chart, we see the phoneme which corresponds to that sound and that happens to be the standard 'e' that we all recognize. Here, bet phonetically looks very similar to bet in the Roman script. Now let's take a look at 'i' bit. Now we look at our chart and we see that this symbol represents the 'i' sound and that resembles a capital I not a lowercase I but a capital I and so we've arrived at bit. Now with 'but' we have to find the sound and that corresponds to this...  [Read more]

The equivalent term to pedagogy, but applied to adults. The term originally coined in the first half of the 1800s has a few variations depending on which part of the world defines it. In the USA and mainly due to the work of Knowles it is defined as the art and science of helping adults learn.  [Read more]

  Throughout section on the teaching of productive skills and the teaching of receptive skills our activate activities will usually involve some form of game and our final consideration here will be the use of games in the classroom. We can start with a definition of what we actually mean by a game and it basically has three components. A game is an activity that has rules it should have for its purpose in the classroom a teaching point and by nature to the fact that it's a game it should also include an element of fun. So that will be our working definition for a game that we're going to use in the classroom. There are many different types of games and they range between the competitive and those will require cooperation and there are all sorts of games that involve both of these...  [Read more]

  In Chantelle’s thirteenth video diary entry she talks about unit 13 of her 120-hour online TEFL course. Unit 13 covers pronunciation and phonology. As Chantelle notes there is a lot of information presented in this unit including phonology, stress, articulation and the phonemic alphabet. The unit also looks at how to teach individual sounds and when we should teach pronunciation to our students. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next. The...  [Read more]

Problems for learners in a Country of your choice: Italy In this paper I will address the issues I face as a teacher from the context of living and working in Italy, as well as the common problems my students encounter while learning and speaking English. I also want to draw attention to the input culture and society has on language, and look at how these factors influence dynamics within the classroom. Of course, it is nearly impossible to view ones self outside your own given cultural perspective, so as a result of this I will also be discussing my own assumptions on how I "imagined" people might act, compared to the reality of the situation. Often I neglect to take into account these differences, simply because I was raised in America, where I am used to a different set of cultural...  [Read more]

Pronunciation Problems for Chinese Students of English As a global language, English has been popularly taught as the second language in China for quite a few years. Now there are more Chinese people learning English on various purposes, such as applying for a higher paid job, studying and living abroad, or establishing business with western countries. According to my experience of learning and teaching English, it is harder to master English pronunciation than English grammar for Chinese students. Chinese grammar may appear quite simple compared to that of many highly-inflected Western languages (e.g. Russian, Latin, etc.), or even the low-scale verb conjugations, for instance, of English (e.g. "swim, swam, swum") because of the lack of inflections. Even though there are similarities...  [Read more]

  Here we have a set of five words, which all share one sound: the ?oh? sound, as in ?go?, ?show?, ?dough?, ?note? and ?boat?. They?re five different spelling patterns to tell our students so they can identify when to make the ?oh? sound. We can have a simple letter ?o?, ?ow?, ?ough?, ?o? with the magic ?e? which turns our vowel into what we knew as long sounds and the ?oa? as in ?boat?. Now, for a non-native learner, perhaps they can handle something like this. They remember that these spelling combinations help to produce the ?oh? sound and they can go about their business looking at the words and memorizing this knowing that these spelling patterns will produce the sound ?oh?. Now that?s okay until we get to a situation where we can also have words like ?to?, ?cow? and also...  [Read more]

  This presentation is going to focus on the ESA methodology of teaching. In our teaching methodologies section, we briefly had a look at what ESA was about, but in this presentation, we're going to look in greater detail about that particular methodology. This particular methodology is accredited to Jeremy Harmer from his "Practice of English language Teaching" book. It's a three-stage methodology and what we're going to do is to look at the purpose of each one of these stages and some typical activities that take place during those stages. So, the first stage is known as the engage and its sole purpose, as the name implies, is to get the students talking and thinking in English. There is no reason whatsoever, when these students come to your class, that they should have said a...  [Read more]