Monday, October 18, 2010

Sound Symbols

Hello!

Today was day one of a new pronunciation course. We have two new students, Tauny and Ricardo. Welcome!

Today was all about the phonetic alphabet that we will use in this course. I asked you WHY we need a phonetic sound system in English class. You told me it's because English is so crazy. It's not like Spanish or Arabic or Romanian. You can learn to pronounce Spanish in one day or one week, no problem. Each letter has only one pronunciation. Is English like that? Oh, no, it isn't.

There can be many ways to spell one sound: too, to, two; one, won.

There can be many ways to pronounce one letter. Look at all the sounds that the letter "o" can make in English: to, son, not, most, cost, doctor, woman, women. Yikes!

So we need a reliable system for referring to the sounds of English.

I passed out a sheet with the symbols that we will use in this class. We won't worry about the vowels quite yet. Today we just looked at the symbols for the consonant sounds. Most of them are pretty easy to remember, aren't they? Many of them look just like the English letter: /b, p, g, k, d, t, h, f, v, s, z, m, n, l, r, y, w/.

But some of them are really weird looking symbols! For example: /ŋ/, /ʃ/, /ð/, /θ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/ and /dʒ/. Those are the ones we have to memorize. To help you learn them, I used flash cards and quizzed you individually and as a group. You all did really well with most of them.

For our final activity, we played BINGO! Each card had 25 words on it, most of them food-related. We went over the rules of the game, then passed out beans as markers. I held up a symbol and said, "Find a word that has this sound at the beginning." We had to clarify what "at the beginning" means.

Everyone did really well. I saw some people helping the newer students. I appreciate that! We had four people BINGO at the same time. I had some little prizes for the winners.

Every day we will continue to drill the consonant symbols for a few minutes at the beginning or at the end of class. Pretty soon we will know them by heart.

See you tomorrow. There is NOT a computer lab day this week.

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