The magic power of sounds

I thought of two different titles for this post: "The magic power of sounds" was one of them; the other was "Too bad we teach our kids to write in a foreign language too soon". I decided to go with the optimistic one.

My five-year-old daughter has been exposed to some English at kindergarten for a couple of years (she’s at “preescolar” now, her last year before primary school first grade). She’s starting to learn how to read and write in Spanish, so my house is full of sticky notes of different colours here and there with words and numbers on them. In her English lessons, they speak and sing songs and recite short poems. They don’t read or write any English yet.

Yesterday, she gave me a present: a small paper with the names of an English family (which they had mentioned at school). The names she had written were MAM, TAT, TOM and LITTU BABY. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that TAT was actually DAD and LITTU meant LITTLE. I thought "wow, this is interesting!"

Our /d/ sound in Spanish is not plosive. In fact, it’s much more similar to the sound in they than to the sound in day in most contexts. So what seemed obvious was that she was perceiving an extra force in the sound in dad, different from Spanish d, which she could only accomodate as a t. Along the same lines, she quite evidently hears some kind of dark l in little, which she interprets as a u. This is great! She’s acquiring sounds!

Trust me: next year, when she starts writing in English, she will say thad (for dad) and litel (for little).

A pity, isn’t it?

Pronunciation matters!

Yes, there is such a thing as an International English and, yes, it’s good to know that our “Englishes” are accepted and even appreciated for their contribution to worldwide communication. But I’m sure many of us would still agree that good pronunciation is important, not only to speak more clearly and communicate more effectively, but also to discriminate sounds and process language better and more quickly when we hear.

There are quite a few pages with resources to study and practice pronunciation online, and others with nice ideas to use in the classroom. Here’s a short list of resouces I’ve used at different times.

A Course in Phonetics by Peter Ladefoged

You can listen to and practice minimal pairs, work on stress and watch movies to see how speech organs actually move when producing a sond, among other things. Audio available for British and American accents.

Antimoon

Find a chart with all English sounds and their IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbols and short introductions to topics such as sounds and word stress. They also offer specific software to learn and practice (not free and American accent only).

English Pronunciation Podcast

You can find free English pronunciation and accent reduction lessons here. Mostly American English. (By the way, I think podcasts are always a great resource to improve listening skills and pronunciation!).

BBC Pronunciation Tips

Downloadable videos and posters to work on different sounds and interactive chart (you click on the chart to listen to the sound).

Plato

Plato means Place the Tonic. You listen to an utterance, mark the nuclear tone as you hear it and get feedback. 

Toni

Toni helps you recognise English nuclear tones. They use terms I don’t think we use in Argentina any more (like low rise, low fall, etc.) but it’s good to work on the recognition of falling and rising tones.

IViE Project

Audio examples of different speaking styles and regional varieties (British English).

Sandy Millin's blog
Sandy has compiled a very interesting list of authentic listening resources, with accents from around Britain.

Phonetics Focus

Great site from Cambridge English Online. Lots of games and activities.

Sounds of English

Pronunciation activities to do with your students (poetry, drama, games).

The necessary question that comes to mind is: how much pronunciation should we teach and practice in our classes and how much progress should we expect?

It’d be great to hear your opinion on this!