One of the key messages in my last post on priorities for English vowels, was that you don’t need the twelve pure vowels (monophthongs) of RP in order to be intelligible in English. Evidence for this assertion is pretty overwhelming, and in addition to common sense observation of English in daily use, this evidence lies […]
Tag Archives: diphthongs
Back in March I posted about misleading guide words. Then the problem had been my use of air as a guide word for the diphthong /eə/. Yesterday, with the same group of students, the problem repeated itself, this time with the selection of a guide word for /aʊ/. I had put the word now on the […]
In class this week I was revising some work I’d done on the pronunciation of the sounds /iː/, /uː/, /ɔː/, /ɪə/, and /eə/. I was preparing the group for some simple discrimination work in which the students would have place words in the appropriate column according to these vowel sounds. Prior to running the exercise […]
englishglobalcom 