Trouble with your empharsis

Hat tip to Nik Peachey. A nice little video to introduce reluctant learners to the usefulness of pronunciation practice, isn’t it? I’d ask students to rank the speakers according to whom they’d have most trouble communicating with.

Gil Scott-Heron: Where Did The Night Go?

Gil Scott Heron (1 April 1949 – 27 May 2011) – good profile on Wikipedia. Thanks to Ann Walsh for the link to this, a quieter, more personal side to the angry granddaddy of rap. Gil Scott-Heron: Where Did The Night Go? Long ago the clock washed midnight away Bringing the dawn Oh God, I […]

The Lords: Poor Boy

Still grinning about how wery hard life was in Berlin in 1965. The German beat band, The Lords, sing and dance “Poor boy”, one of their greatest hits. Now, I’m not knocking writing and singing in a foreign language, on the contrary, it’s really great! But for an English teacher like me it’s fascinating to […]

Weird w

I’m having a hard time with that weird phoneme, /w/. Gerald Kelly puts it in a table (Kelly 1988:7) as both bilabial – using both lips, as with /p/, /b/ and /m/ – and velar – using the back of the tongue against the soft palate, like /k/, /g/ and /ŋ/. Bilabial, yes. But velar? […]

Phonology 101

On our course Patricia introduced us to two great sites to help with phonology. First, there’s the excellent online typewriter, the Phonemic Character Keyboard, which is based on the comprehensive IPA character picker, two tools which, taken together, are just what you need to be able to write a post like this! Then, there’s the […]