Teacher Discussion Forums

[FayeW]

I'm an ALT in Japan and I'm coaching a student for a speech contest. She's been having a lot of problems with the "sh" sound. She keeps pronouncing it like a "s". I can't figure out how to help her pronounce "sh". If someone has a good trick or any advice please let me know as I think its frustrating her. Thanks!

[EH]

The /sh/ sound and the /s/ sound are very similar. For both sounds, the tongue tip is rounded and air escapes through the rounded tip. The sides of the tongue touch the upper teeth to prevent the air from escaping sideways.

To move from a /s/ sound to a /sh/ sound, start by making a good /s/, then slide your tongue backwards, keeping your tongue in the same rounded position. Try this a few times yourself, going as far back as you can (i.e., past the correct /sh/ position). This helps you get a feeling for moving your tongue around. Then do it again, and stop yourself when the /sh/ sound seems just right to you. Once you can do the /s --> sh/ slide yourself, teach it to your student. After the student learns how to make the sound well in isolation, teach it to her in short words, then phrases, then sentences, then spontaneous conversation.

One other note: sometimes a student actually already knows how to produce a problem sound in some contexts. Can your student say /sh/ ever, in any words? If so, don't bother with the /s --> sh/ slide. Just start with the context that works, then move onto other contexts from there.

Feel free to PM me with any other specific questions.
-EH

[memorabilis]

To add to the above poster, the /s/ sound is caused by the air rushing around the top teeth, that's why the tongue is close to them at the alveolar ridge. The /sh/ sound is caused by the air hitting the bottom teeth. The tongue is farther back, so the air rushes around it and hits the lower teeth.

[EH]

Yes, you may feel more air on your top front teeth for /s/ and on your bottom front teeth for /sh/. And having teeth does make it easier for some people to make those sounds, whereas loosing teeth makes it harder.

But luckily, having front teeth is not absolutely necessary to produce the sounds correctly. Most toothless adults and (temporarily) toothless kids can still make great /s, sh/ sounds.

All you really need is a complete and working tongue that knows what to do, a palate/alveolar ridge with no holes (clefts) in it, and air coming out of your throat.

...Which is a long was of saying that the sounds are not actually caused by air hitting the teeth. (though if you have teeth, air will hit them)

[revel]

Good morning.

Although the descriptions already offered are valid, they all have the same common difficulty: the student can not see his/her own tongue nor the tongue of the person trying to teach the articulation. If the student has some external evidence of the difference of articulation he/she has a better chance of producing the sound.

Using the good old "She sells sea shells" tongue twister, have the student pronounce the sh pushing the lips forward while pulling them completely back to produce the s sound. The tongue does not have to move at all for the two different sounds to be realized. Begin the exercise thus:

s s s s sh sh sh sh
sh sh sh sh s s s s

Then isolate the pattern of change without the words:

sh s s sh s sh

and repeat that one for a while. Then use the words, insisting that the students really push their lips forward when needed and pull them back when needed. Once the student begins to distinguish between the two sounds the exaggerated lip movement can be lessoned and a more "natural" sh sound can be made. I have the opposite problem with Spanish speakers, where their s sound is "muddy" and they often confuse it with the sh, and rarely hiss enough when making an s sound. Get a mirror and make them look at their mouths.

peace,
revel.

[EH]

I feel like I'm becoming the queen of annoyingly picky details, and I apologize for that. And yet I persist...

Revel, I agree that one reason /s/ and /sh/ are so difficult to learn to pronounce is because you can't see the articulator movement very well. But I strongly disagree that moving the lips without moving the tongue will produce the difference between /s/ and /sh/. That's just not acoustically possible. You will get two different sounds by moving just the lips, but the sounds are not anywhere close to the difference between /s/ and /sh/.

Perhaps the success you indicate you've had with this method is because when you move your lips it helps cue you to--without being aware of it--move your tongue appropriately as well?

[Lorikeet]

Okay I just tried it, and there's no way I can get a /sh/ sounds by making a /s/ sound and just rounding my lips. (And everyone around me probably thinks I'm nuts :p)

I was able, however, to get a /sh/ sound from a /s/ sound by pulling back my tongue, with no lip rounding at all.

[revel]

Good afternoon all!

Well, having re-read my post, I did indeed say that the tongue does not have to move, and that of course is not true, the tongue should move, though mine does not do the same pull-back thingy as described by others. When making an s, the air passes over the tip of my tongue, which is also slightly folded, while when making the sh, the tip of my tongue unfolds and lowers a bit, so that the air is passing over a flatter surface. The lip-pushing exercise is to help students realize that by changing where they place parts of their mouth, they change the sound they are trying to make. Although it is not the sh, when an s is produced with the lips pushed forward like a fish, the sound indeed changes slightly. Naturally, working with Spanish people whose s sound is closer to our sh than our s, pushing the lips forward makes that nice focused sh sound we want, and it is the hisssssing s sound that causes them problems. Learners with other L1s will have different problems. All in all, it is getting them to think about their tongues and lips and the form, shape, friction of the sound that is really helpful. And once in the middle of a sentence, what with reduction and liason, that sh just may not be all that important anyway. She is a pronoun that only carries emphasis in counted occasions, and though the student says "see has a new suit", because of its position in the sentence, we probably will understand "she", but that's a word-order issue that has little to do with the current debate.

Thanks for pointing out my gaffee, should have written more carefully.

peace,
revel.

[Pronunci]

Hi,

My wife had the similar problem saying the S sound and the SH sound. She had trouble saying sit and often she ends up with xxxx. I couldn't correct her until I asked her to say cit instead of sit. If she wants to say a word containing the SH sound, I will tell her to think about the word she first, then she can say words such as shelf because the word she is a common word.

I hope this helps. Please visit my website at www.PronunciationPatterns.com. We use phonics and phonetic patterns to help English learners to remember correct pronunciation.

You can download a copy of free demo to see if you can help your students by using my program.


Xin Wang

[EH]

Um... how do you pronounce "cit" so it's different than "sit"? Are you talking about the pinyin pronunciation rules for "c" that make it sound like /ts/? I don't get it. I think I'm missing something.

But you bring up an interesting point, Xin Wang. Some people are able to physically produce a sound (articulate it) but can't remember to do it in all words in all contexts (not really in their phonemic system). A lot of teachers just help the students to pronounce a sound once or twice and then expect that the sound will automatically generalize into all appropriate contexts. But that is rarely the case. It's also important to systematically practice the sound in different words, then in phrases, then in simple sentences, oral reading, and eventually in conversation.

[globaltefl]

Have her say 00, as in boot. The mouth will be rounded. Keeping the rounded position, have her say /su/ as in sa si su se so. It's interesting because the /si/ in Japanese is /she/, but the lips are not rounded. They
cannot hear the difference between see and she, because the /si/ in Japanese is not phonemic--does not make a difference in meaning.

goog luck!
Global TEFL

[CEJ]

[CEJ]

Something related came up under the thread for the young learner with a possible lisp (Korean native speaker), but I thought what I last wrote might be of relevance to this thread as well. So I repeat:

I thought some more about the s, sh, and th sounds, and another thing to consider in connected speech (or models of it): assimilation.

Considering the point of articulation (and I would say there is variation, I agree with EH on that, and there is also secondary articulation as well) the s sound is set to interact with phonetically/articulatorily similar ones.

Try saying repeated, rapidly:

1. Face this
2. Nice ship
3. Place your
4. Horse ride

[Superhal]

I would agree with memorabilis, although for a student I would instruct them to lower their tongue rather than moving it back.

[CEJ]