Welcome to TOFL!
Your Source for Lessons and Activities in American English Articulatory PHONETICS
Speech self-assessment requires awareness of the manner in which sounds are produced. Learners gain better appreciation of their language when they think about how they use speech organs such as the tongue, lips and teeth to produce vowel and consonant sounds. Inherently native speakers know, for example, that some consonants are pronounced with vibration in the throat or that the upper and lower lips are rounded for sounds like "o" and "w" but flat for "p" and "e". Students can take pride in identifying parts of the vocal tract and classifying the sounds of American English according to the articulators used to create them.
Speech Awareness
Phonetic Spelling
Universal symbols provide a more sophisticated means of describing American speech sounds than the twenty-six alphabet letters we use for writing. The international phonetic alphabet (IPA) more accurately represents American English speech sounds because each letter or symbol represents a single speech sound (phoneme). Why is this important? Speech/language models (educators) can describe to both native speakers and second-language learners the sounds that they hear and utter as opposed to what they see on paper. Rather than describing vowels as long or short, students can relate vowels to their unique articulatory features with the help of a phonetic vowel diagram that contains word examples for each phoneme.
Foreign Influences
A fluent speaker of American English recognizes how sounds are pronounced in context with other sounds. For instance, double consonants normally associate with a "short" vowel sound whereas single consonants usually cluster with a "long" vowel. Consider "pollen" vs. "Poland". Also consider "mussel" and "muse" but the exceptional pair "rabid" and "rabbit".
American English words derived from French, German, and Arabic account for some of the spelling and pronunciation inconsistencies in our language. The pronunciation of the same letter clusters may be pronounced differently from one language to another. For example, in French "pays" (country) is pronounced very similar to the English word "pays"("compensates"), with a "long" a . However, in the Spanish word for country "pais", the combination vowel (diphthong) is closer to the "long" i and "long" e of American English.
Compare the range of pronunciations for the letters "ei".
freight (from Old German) rhymes with "date"
receive (from Old French) rhymes with "leave"
height (from (Old British English) rhymes with "kite"
Speech Styles
Labelling speech as "proper" versus "street" has become an outdated concept. Educators can reduce the stigmas associated with individual speech habits by emphasizing the importance of flexibility in communicating. Discuss environments for casual vs. careful and formal vs. informal speech behavior. Students can learn to exercise discretion when speaking depending upon the situation. What constitutes the correct enunciation of words and what are "deviations"? They can determine what settings it would be appropriate to follow speech conventions and when "slang" is okay. In other words, where do these speech sounds (not I) fit in?
Toward Higher Literacy
As students achieve heightened phonemic awareness, they are able to combine symbols into words phonetically in addition to alphabetically. They will understand the language that they speak and hear with added depth, which translates into dual decoding capabilities--and refined literacy skills:
