Phonetic Symbols And Examples

  Peter took the 120-hour online TEFL course with ITTT. In this TEFL review, Peter mentions how he found the course to be well designed and well thought out. One thing Peter discusses is how earning a TEFL certificate and teaching English abroad is a great way to learn about new cultures and share about your own country with people all over the world. Peter would like to continue studying with ITTT and the many different courses that are available. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section...  [Read more]

  There are two issues that need to be stressed when working with the international phonemic alphabet. First is the fact that we are no longer concerned with how a word is traditionally spelled. Additionally we need to stress that we are only concerned with the sounds needed to correctly produce a word. So rather than numerous spellings, which can often be pronounced in different ways, we have one symbol representing one sound. Once we can isolate a sound, rather than juggling various spellings, we can work with our students on how to say that sound. Doing that successfully is related to manner and place of articulation, which will be covered shortly. To get a better understanding of the phonemic alphabet, let's take a look at our chart. In the bottom half of our chart we have our...  [Read more]

Pronunciation plays a crucial role in effective communication in English. Poor pronunciation can lead to misunderstandings and hinder students' ability to express themselves clearly. When teaching ESL students pronunciation, it is essential to focus on both segmental features (individual sounds) and suprasegmental features (stress, intonation, rhythm). By improving their pronunciation, students can enhance their overall language proficiency and confidence in using English in real-life situations. One effective strategy for teaching pronunciation is the use of minimal pairs, which are pairs of words that differ by only one sound (e.g., ship/sheep, thin/then). By practicing minimal pairs, students can learn to distinguish between similar sounds and improve their accuracy in pronunciation....  [Read more]

  So, the document itself needs to contain some general information about the class, for example the name of the teacher, the date and time of the lesson, what level of class is being taught and in what room, how many students are we expecting, this is important, when we've got things like photocopying and materials to do, what is the context of the lesson, in other words, what is the lesson actually about, what vocabulary or grammar point is this lesson covering and sometimes it's also useful to write out what the focus of the lesson is. So, in effect, the context of the lesson is telling us the grammar point, for example, that might be the present continuous tense, whereas the focus is telling us how we're going to go about teaching it. Another example to illustrate this: Let's...  [Read more]

Pronunciation is a crucial aspect of language learning as it directly impacts communication effectiveness. Poor pronunciation can lead to misunderstandings and miscommunication, hindering students' ability to express themselves clearly. As a TEFL teacher, focusing on pronunciation helps students feel more confident in their language skills and enhances their overall fluency. By teaching pronunciation, you are equipping students with the tools they need to communicate effectively in real-world situations. There are several effective strategies for teaching pronunciation in the TEFL classroom. One key strategy is modeling - demonstrating correct pronunciation yourself and providing students with clear examples to follow. Another approach is to focus on individual sounds, helping students...  [Read more]

--- Teaching English pronunciation is crucial as it enhances communication skills, boosts confidence, and aids in better comprehension. Proper pronunciation helps students express themselves clearly and be understood by others. It also plays a vital role in language acquisition and overall language proficiency. Without good pronunciation, language learners may struggle to make themselves understood, leading to miscommunication and frustration. Therefore, focusing on pronunciation in English language teaching is essential for students to become effective communicators. --- There are several effective strategies that teachers can utilize to help students improve their English pronunciation. One key strategy is to focus on individual sounds and phonemes, breaking them down and practicing them...  [Read more]

  The next item we're going to consider is the use of dictionaries and here perhaps the first thing we should do is to make a distinction between the two main types of dictionary and that distinction is between the monolingual and the bilingual dictionary. In a monolingual dictionary you have a word and its associated meaning and those two are both described for example in English so the word and the description of that word are both given in English. Whereas in a bilingual dictionary that word meaning could often be for example the word given in English and the explanation given in Thai and vice versa. So what can we use a dictionary for? Well, within the dictionary itself obviously we can get things like how words are spelled or the spelling of the word. We can also get the...  [Read more]

  Our next methodology is called the silent way and it's accredited to Caleb Gattegno and was developed in or around the 1970s. This particular methodology moved on from the behaviorist stimulus response to what's called a theory of constructivism and this constructivist approach was very very different, very radical to anything that had been tried before. The background to this particular methodology was that there was a French mathematics teacher who found that his students were finding it very difficult to understand particular concepts. What he realized was that what they needed was a more visual representation of the information. So he came up with a series of colored rods to help with those concepts in mathematics. He gave his name to those rods and they're called Cuisenaire...  [Read more]