How to Teach English Pronunciation 101—Mastering Articulation Air Blocking and Voicing TESOL

Hello everybody. My name is Victor Cahon and teach English in Brazil. Today we are going to check how to teach pronunciation to our students especially how to teach them how to use articulation or how the sounds are physically produced in our mouths. Whenever we are learning new language producing some sounds may be little bit tricky and that's because in our mother tongs we may use different parts of our mouths to produce them. So because of that today we're going to check three characteristics of producing sounds. The first one of them is places of articulation. The second one will be the blocking of air. And the third one will be voicing. So check this video and especially if you want to use the phonamic chart to teach pronunciation, this video is great introduction. First, the parts of our mouth that are needed to produce sounds are called places of articulation. Technically, vowel sounds don't need places of articulation, but consonental sounds will have to use them. We may have two types of places of articulation. We may have passive places of articulation, which are the parts of our mouth that don't move when we are producing sounds or we may have active places of articulation, which are the parts of our mouth that are moving when we are speaking. So for instance, passive place of articulation would be our front teeth or maybe our soft pallet while an active place of articulation would be for instance maybe our tongue or maybe our lips. So you can use them whenever we are speaking and producing sounds. To practice places of articulation with our students, good strategy is to think about the initial sounds of words. So if you take word such as all for example and you keep changing the place of articulation for the first sound for its first sound we may kind of feel that. So for instance if you use your lips you may have something like ball. If you use your bottom lip and you know the front teeth maybe you're going to have something as fall and if you use the tip of your tongue you're going to have word such as tall. Our second characteristic is the blocking of air. And as we have seen because of the places of articulation in consonental sounds when we are producing sound when we are speaking the air that is coming out of our mouths is going to be stopped somehow and it may be partially stopped or maybe totally almost completely stopped. So if you take word such as ball for instance and if you think about the first sound the sound of this word we're going to have both lips kind of stop in the air right and that's why the sound is going to be called stop sound. Interesting right? If you take word such as sight and if you think about the first sound, the sound we have, we're going to feel that the air is kind of like escaping kind of like slithering out of our mouths. And that's why we're going to call this sound sibilent sound. And this is very interesting for students to know. And good way to practice this with them is ask them to get piece of paper or maybe their hands and put them in front of their mouths. when they produce the sounds, when they produce these words, ask them to feel how the air is being expelled out of their mouths. So, they're going to feel something stronger with ball, but maybe they're going to feel something little bit weaker with fall or maybe tall. And finally, it's possible for couple of sounds to have the same place of articulation and the same blocking of air as the other one. So in this case, the only difference these sounds are going to have is the vibration of the vocal cords. If the vocal cords vibrate little bit more, we're going to call this voiced sound. If it doesn't vibrate that much, we're going to call it voiceless sound. So if we take two words, for instance, if you have dog, you have pet. And if you have lot of money, you can always bet on something, right? So bat and pet. If you take the words the first sound, the and the you're going to see that you're going to be using your both lips to produce them and the air is almost being completely stopped. So, it's stop sound. What differentiates both of these sounds is how much the vocal cords vibrate. So, if you put your hands around your neck and if you say pat and then you say bat, you're going to see that the sound on bat is the one that vibrates more. So, it's voiced sound. And to practice this with students, ask them, and here we're going to have to find think about different words, but pat and bat are words that work fine. Ask them to put their hands around on their necks as they produce them. And ask students to pay attention to the initial sound of the words because those sounds that have more vibration of vocal cords are the voiced sounds. Places of articulation, blocking of air, and voicing are three characteristics that can help students with sound awareness in English and that can help us teaching pronunciation in an effective and intelligible way. So, for more strategies, be sure to check out the other videos in Tissol's how to teach English series. Happy teaching.