International Phonetic Alphabet Symbols And Sounds

  There are certain words that need backshifting when using reported speech. In this video we look at backshifting places in reported speech. This video is specifically aimed at teaching reported speech in an ESL setting. 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 was about the pronunciation and the phonology of the English language and how to teach it to student. Pronunciation is something that most students find very difficult in the...  [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]

  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]