Teacher Discussion Forums

Up until about 2000, I was interested. In terms of feedback they seemed limited to representations of acoustics, which isn't very helpful for ESL and EFL students who need articulation training. They can't get there from just looking at oscillographs. If there are better programs out there, I might ...

This is a new reply to a rather old thread. I think it's interesting to look at it from the idea of how English speakers get confused with the Japanese sound. The Japanese /r/ sounds like an /l/, a /d/ and an /r/ in real Japanese when a lot of English speakers perceive it, depending on its context/p...

In terms of articulation, many /l/, /n/ and /r/ sounds are somewhat similar. In English, /l/ and /r/ have acoustic profiles that can cause perception issues. Although a phonemic approach is attractive in its simplicity (contrast the three, perhaps two at a time), it is ultimately self-defeating beca...

A word final [t] is often a glottal plosive. Since glottal sounds, like reduced vowel sounds, are not acknowledged in written forms of the language, they go largely unnoticed by native speakers, despite their great frequency. In the case of /t/--and /p/-- I find it interesting we should go from one ...

The following is a very good though limited account of [r] sounds, including variation within English: http://www.hi.is/~peturk/KENNSLA/02/TOP/r.html A gestural account would show complexity and variation well beyond a standard phoneme-allophone account (though this account does hint at that complex...

[quote="Lorikeet I'm sure however you teach it works for you, but in my speech, the /r/ doesn't seem to have a bunch of allophones. (Unlike the "t" sound for example, for which I have 4 different sounds.) I think I use the same "r" at the beginning, the middle, and the end, and none of them are ret...

TEFL is hamstrung by a structuralist approach to pronunciation that doesn't work well for teaching pronunciation. Or, pronunciation is relegated to status of minor skill, something about accent adjustment. If we treat pronunciation as applied phonology, we see phonology acquisition is integral to AL...

[quote="globaltefl"]I have found the following extremely helpful for the /r/ and /l/ problem: 1. Have the student say 00 as in boot. The lips must be and remain rounded. The tongue will automatically move back in the mouth. 2. Holding that position, have the student say /root/. The tongue will not b...

I think that perhaps the acquisition of English /r/ sounds might more naturally follow after the acquisition of sounds that enable it: vowels with lip rounding (not all languages have this, or with the same vowels that English does), /w/, and then /l/ (which in its various manisfestations can be qui...

In which case, we could see that SL/FL/L2 phonological acquisition is as integral as syntax, morphology or lexicon. Indeed, phonology provides the 'material' for much of vocabulary acquisition and production, and it's structure could well be as much a part of 'grammar' as other elements more usually...