Consonants are produced by pushing air up from the lungs and out through the mouth and/or nose. Airflow is disrupted by obstructions made by various combinations of vocal articulator movements, so that audible friction is produced.
They are described in terms of (1) voicing, (2) place of articulation and (3) manner of articulation.
A series of activities and content for exploring the sounds of English
Goals
Understand the difference between phonetics and phonology
Explore the ways that we can write sounds down, using the phonetic alphabet
Apply this knowledge to a text and consider some of the stylistic effects of sound choices
Lesson Plan
This lesson plan is split into sections, and includes enough material for around 3 hours of teaching: (1) a starter activity (group discussion); (2) an explanation of phonetics and phonology; (3) vowels; (4) consonants; (5) a transcripti
Phonetics and phonology are the branches of linguistics that deals with speech sounds. This broad ranging definition is indicative of the broad type of work that phoneticians/phonologists do:
Looking at the importance of sound in a literary text
Sound patterns in poetry
Here are two extracts from the poem Digging by Seamus Heaney. In the poem, a son talks openly about his perceived failures in following in his father's footsteps, namely because of his lack of skill with a spade and as a farmer.
Read them out loud:
Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down
In this activity, you'll be using your knowledge of articulatory phonetics to transcribe spoken language. To do so, you'll be using the phonetic alphabet - a system designed by linguists to represent speech sounds on the page.
In the starter activity, we asked the question 'How can we write down speech sounds? For example, how can we capture the difference between a northern British accent saying bath and a southern British accent saying bath?
I’m sitting here looking out of the window. Nothing’s happening; it never does. I sit here every day for hours on end, just looking. Looking for what? I don’t know. They never told me what I should be looking for. And I’ve never found out.
I once thought I’d found something, but I couldn’t be sure. It might just have been a trick of the light. How was I to tell?
Identify the place of turn-taking in spoken conversation.
Analyse some examples of turn-taking in real spoken conversation.
Lesson Plan
The Activity pages appear in the menu entitled 'This Unit' in the upper right corner of this page. Each Activity page includes a video interview. If you like, you can try this lesson with any other interview or dialogue you would like to use.
Identify some elements of spoken dialogue in an interview setting.
Analyse some features of colloquial language, specifically the kinds of words and phrases that are used.
Lesson Plan
The Activity page appears in the menu entitled 'This Unit' in the upper right corner of this page. It includes a video of an interview between Russell Brand and Ed Miliband, recorded just before the UK General Election in May 2015.
This activity involves working with nonfiniteclauses to do some sentence-splitting and sentence-joining. The purpose is to develop your awareness of the different kinds of structures that are available to you as a writer.
This lesson invites students to explore the differences and similarities between vocabulary pairs like make and produce, take and transfer, and give and provide.
Englicious contains many resources for English language in schools, but the vast majority of them require you to register and log in first. For more information, see What is Englicious?
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