More Voiced / Voiceless Contrasts

Hello, Students!

I got a bit behind in my writing here, didn't I?

On Tuesday we reviewed voiced and voiceless sounds. Then we learned how to make the voiced TH sound. This is the sound in "the," "then," "they" and "than," isn't it? We did some listening work and some work with minimal pairs with partners. At the end of the class we looked at some intriguing photographs from magazines and talked about them with our partners using "I think..." to practice voiceless TH and words like "the," "they" and "that" to practice voiced TH. For example, "I think the woman is a mother. I think the doorbell is ringing. I think the baby will be in trouble."

On Wednesday we again reviewed voicing. I asked you to give me voiced sounds as I listed them on the whiteboard. Across from those we listed the voiceless sounds that are made the same way in the mouth. We came up with: /b/ and /p/, /g/ and /k/, etc. We also listed a few consonant sounds that do not have any voiceless counterpart in English, like /r/, /l/ and /y/.

Then we focused on the voiced/voiceless pair /d/ and /t/. We did some listening and recognition practice before speaking practice. We read a story and tried to identify the three ways that the regular past tense ending can be pronounced. We came up with /t/, /d/ and /Id/.

We took all the verbs from the story and placed them into one of three columns. Then we tried to find the pattern or rule. We decided that when a verb ends in a /t/ or /d/ sound, the past tense ending sounds like /Id/. Otherwise, a final voiced sound makes the past tense ending /d/ and a voiceless final sound makes it sound like /t/.

For our final activity that day we interviewed our partners to find out what they used to do "always, sometimes, or never" when we were children. For example, one question was, "When you were young, did you kiss your mother goodbye in the morning?" The answer would be "Yes, I always kissed her goodbye," "Well, I sometimes kissed her goodbye," or "No, I never kissed her goodbye." I noticed that you helped each other figure out how to say the past tense endings and made notes for yourselves using the phonetic symbols. That's great!