Learning how to produce sounds in a second language is challenging with sounds that aren’t in your first language.

When teaching, I get uncomfortable when a student asks for help with pronunciation. My usual solution is to make certain the student can identify difficult sounds before trying to pronounce them. Once the student learns to identify the sounds, I find it difficult to teach the student how to produce the sounds.

I don’t think I am alone: I have seen many teachers modelling sounds really slowly while the student stares at the teacher’s mouth, the teacher hoping the student will suddenly get it. I suspect that a lot of students in foreign English language schools have had a teacher, at one time or another, model the sound this way trying to teach pronunciation.

Learning to recognise a sound before you start trying to speak it is probably a good approach to take. However, once you are ready to learn to speak the sounds, there is a really useful phonetics tool for learning the sounds found in English, German, and Spanish on the University of Iowa website.

The University of Iowa has a webpage with short animations showing how each sound is produced. Along with the animations are videos of the sound being spoken on its own and used in several words.

The sounds are sorted according to linguistic crieria and are shown with their International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) letters. I wrote a post about how students can use the IPA to learn English. If you don’t know what the IPA is, or you don’t know how learning the IPA would benefit you, then you might want to check it out.

Before sitting down to write this post, I went back to the University of Iowa site to brush up on my Spanish. The Spanish sound that I have the most trouble with is the double l, as in “Sevilla.” Watching the animation didn’t really help much until I tried a few sounds that I was familiar with. After getting a feel for how the different movements shown in the animations translated to my mouth, it got easier to reproduce the sounds from listening and watching the animations. I thoroughly recommend trying sounds that you already know first to learn how to evaluate yourself before you use the phonetics tool for difficult sounds.

The tool on the University of Iowa site is produced by the Departments of Spanish and Portugese, German, Speech Pathology and Audiology, and Academic Technologies. We should be grateful to them for putting this tool out for any student to use.

Till next time, best of luck with your studies.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Pronunciation, English, EFL, ESL, Study Tips, Reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.