Here’s a video with the English alphabet for beginners. Here you can do two activities. First you can listen to the video and repeat the names of the letters and after, you can click on the quiz button below and do the sound quiz.
A great way to learn English is watching a film, but the thing is, how many of us have the time to watch films these days? I mean, I can hardly remember the last time I was able to relax on my settee with this intention, let alone watching one in a foreign language!
Definitely, present-day duties just don’t seem to understand our needs, do they? So, unless we can plug vocabulary, stress patterns and pronunciation into our brains just like those guys did in The Matrix, we’ll need a backup plan.
Why not try listening to music? It’s easy and fun. You can do this, working, cooking, driving, walking the dog, writing or whatever (as long as it doesn’t make you get up and start dancing). Music can also teach us structures that we need to get our tongues around, and a great number of songs have really catchy tunes that we’ll enjoy trying to understand and even learn.
Here I’ve exploited the soundtrack from the movie Up by Disney. The song is I’ll Keep you Safe by Sleeping at last. It´s a wonderful song along with a beautiful video (watch out! It could make you quite emotional! ) and although the title is great for dealing with ‘will’ used for promises, here I’ve exploited it to practise some of the English sounds and to help students become more familiar with phonetic symbols. If you haven’t seen anything about phonetics yet, you may want to brush up a bit on them before doing the activity (you’ll find plenty of introductory activities if you click on the menu Phonetics and English sounds).
Anyway, hope you enjoy the lesson.
PS If you don’t see me around much lately, it’s just that I’m SO STRESSSSSSSSSSSSSEDDDD OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUT!!!!!!!!!!!
Benjamin Zephaniah’s poem on animal rights and Christmas, is not only thought provoking, but is also put in such a humorous and clever way, that you actually can’t help admiring him as one of Britain’s top post-war writers.
Zephaniah, a dub poet and Rastafarian, once mentioned that his mission was to fight the dead image of poetry and take it to the streets with messages that concerned the daily lives of ordinary people; like you and me.
As an ESL teacher, having the opportunity to introduce students to the culture of my native UK and to poets such as Zephaniah, is really something awesome.
Enjoy!
Click for activity
One of the typical problems learners of English frequently come across is how to pronounce the endings in regular past English verbs. When I mean regular I mean all the ones that end in -ed/d like ‘walk>walked’, ‘study>studied’. There are actually some simple rules that will help students get this right almost all the times.
Rule number one: careful not to pronounce the final -ed
It is very unusual to pronounce an ‘e’ before a ‘d’ in a past simple tense unless the consonant before the final -ed ends in either a ‘t’ or a ‘d’ (we’ll see this in a minute). So the past sound of final -ed in a verb like ‘designed’ would sound like /dɪ ‘zaind/ and not /dɪ ‘zained/.
Rule number two: pronouncing the final -ed and making it sound like an /id/
Verbs that end in a ‘d’ or ‘t’ do sound the final -e. Why? Because if you don’t sound it, you won’t be able to distinguish the difference between a present and a past tense. See this for yourself by saying the following verbs without pronouncing the ‘e’.
Was it easy? Could you hear the difference between the present and past? Actually, these verbs should sound /sta:tid, dipa:tid, ek’si:did/.
You may have noticed that what actually comes out of your mouth isn’t exactly an -ed sound. Instead of this, you get an /id/. Well, this is basically because when people pronounce the final /d/, it is in the upper part of their mouths which is almost the same place as where the /i/ is pronounced. If you really want to make your final -ed sound like an -ed and not an -id, you’d have to sort of stop in the middle of the word, lower your tongue and focus really hard on it, which looks and sounds quite strange (and if you don’t believe me, try doing this in the mirror and see what you look like. Ha, ha, ha!!!).
Rule number three. Getting your ‘ts’ right
Pronouncing a /t/ instead of a /d/ isn’t a matter of choice. Rather it is due to the final sound in the word. If the final sound in the verb happens to be an unvoiced consonant like a ‘k’ or a ‘p’ or a ‘sh’, for instance, you’re are going to get that very English /t/ sound whether you like it or not. If you happen to get a ‘d’ sound instead, it probably means that you’re pronouncing the -e which isn’t correct.
So, with verbs like ‘walk’, work, flap, burp, should sound /wɔ: kt, wɜ:kt, flæpt, bɜ:pt/ when saying them in the simple past.
Lets do some listening activities to grasp the ideas we’ve just explained.
Try to figure out what these words would sound like in the past simple before you listen to the audio.
Samples
READ – CAR – WRITE – WRONG – RHYME – CURRY
/dʒ/ for job
/j/ for yes
/ʃ/ for sheep
/tʃ/ for cheap
Notice the difference between these pairs of words:
SHEEP/CHEAP – SHARE/CHAIR – NATION/NATURE – SHIP/CHIP
