R-colouring

Hello!

Welcome to our new students! I sure missed you all while I was away on vacation last week. I hope you had a good time with Stephanie learning p/b, sh/ch and consonant clusters.

Today we talked about the North American English /r/ sound, which is different from the R sound in most other languages. Spanish, Italian and Romanian have the tap R and the trilled R. They say R-r-r-r-roberto. The tip of the tongue taps or flaps against the ridge behind the top teeth once or many times. The Scottish dialect of English also has a trilled R. But we don't have that R in North American English. Our R is very different.

I showed you how to produce the Canadian R. You can look up at the ceiling and relax the tongue. Just let it fall down in your mouth. It will curl back toward the back of your mouth a bit. Now bring your head back down while keeping your tongue right there and say "er."

When R follows a vowel sound, it changes the vowel sound a bit. This is called "r-colouring." For example, the /ir/ sound in "ear" is not really the tense vowel /iy/ + /r/ and it's not really the lax vowel /I/ + /r/. It's somewhere in between.

We practiced some words with the schwa + r sound, like purse, earth, hurt, girl. There are so many ways to spell this sound, eh? It occurs a lot at the end of job names. You helped me come up with a long list of those: plumber, teacher, doctor, lawyer, manager, ...

We also said that many comparatives end in "-er," like taller, shorter, bigger, smaller, smarter...

Next we practiced at words in which R follows the other five vowel sounds.

We read a passage about Kelly's holiday in Muskoka. The story had lots of words for practicing r-colouring: starts, meteors, farm, garden, bear, clearer, cooler, cleaner.

Finally we had some conversation topics to choose from in order to practice R-colouring in conversation with a partner. Most of the topics involved comparing two things, such as your home town with Windsor, or city life with country life, or a doctor's earnings with a dentist's.

After ten minutes, I asked you all to share what you had discussed with your partners.

I hope you enjoyed practicing the Canadian R sound today.

See you tomorrow in the computer lab!