‘D’ could be for quite a lot of issues in pronunciation including dialect, diphthong or devoicing, but I thought I’d follow up from my post on bilabials with this one on dental consonants. There are two dental consonants in English, /θ/ and /ð/, as in thing and that, respectively. The two sounds are made in the same way, […]
Monthly Archives: April 2020
The term ‘comprehensibility’ isn’t part of our everyday ELT vocabulary. We’re more used to talking about comprehension in terms of the questions accompanying a reading or listening text we are working on with our students. But ‘comprehensibility’ is a term used in pronunciation that is related to accent and also to intelligibility, and which, together […]
As anyone will know who has studied Latin or who speaks a Romance language, the term ‘bilabial’ comes from bi- (twice, double), and labialis (having to do with the lips). In the pronunciation of English, the three consonant sounds that are made by bringing our lips together are /p/, /b/ and /m/ as in pat, bat and mat, respectively. The action […]
I ended my first post on accent by raising the question as to which accent we should use for teaching the pronunciation of English, so I guess that now I have to offer you some sort of answer. Here goes. (Shame on you all, by the way, for not putting anything in the comment box by […]
‘A’ is for accent. And given that accent is one of the core issues in pronunciation teaching, there is really no other place to start an alphabet-ordered pronunciation blog. Accent is what everyone has, what many learners tell teachers they want to lose, and what some unscrupulous commercial ventures claim they can ‘reduce’. (If you […]
Every cloud, supposedly, has a silver lining. I guess my COVID-19 silver lining is the time I have on my hands. That, and the fact that I’m at home and not in a hotel. So with time on my hands, I thought it was about time that I dug up an idea that has sat […]
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