PHONETICS PROCEDURES

PHONETICS PROCEDURES

1. Watch your LANGUAGE HELPER’s (LH) mouth. Get close! How does their tongue
move? How far does it come forward or go backward? How rounded are their lips?
2. Listen intently. You will not be able to produce a sound until you hear it right.
3. English is “lip lazy.” We tend to glide into our vowels (more about this later) thereby
producing more than one vowel sound. Many languages shape their vowels before they
say them, producing what we call pure vowels. Concentrate on producing pure vowels.
4. Isolate those sounds you find difficult, and set up drills. If possible, find words where the
difficult sounds occur at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of words. The
exercises on the following pages will demonstrate this.
5. Record your LH reading children’s stories slowly and with feeling. That kind of reading
highlights individual sounds.
6. Record yourself trying to read the same stories. Doing so enables you to compare your
pronunciation with that of your LH.
7. You must learn to listen to yourself speak, and then self-correct.
8. Don’t be confused by the way a language is written. Often, letters in the alphabet cover
more than one sound. Remember, English has twenty-six letters which, alone or in
combination with others, represent forty-four sounds.
9. When you sat down at your table, you found a small mirror along with your notebook.
Whenever necessary, use it during the session to see what’s going on in your mouth.