Page 196 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

Chapter 12: What Accent? Teaching Pronunciation
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The phoneme /ə/ is called the schwa. It represents the sound that causes
the most confusion as it can be represented by so many vowels. However,
it only occurs in a syllable that carries no stress, or strong emphasis. Some words may include the schwa when the word is not stressed but change the pronunciation when it is stressed. Consider ‘can’ in these two statements, for example:
Can we talk? Yes we can.
You probably stressed ‘talk’ in the first statement, if you said it at normal speed, and said ‘can’ very quickly using the schwa. In the second statement ‘can’ is stressed a lot more so the schwa changes to /æ/.
Doing double vowel sounds
Double vowel sounds are literally two vowels combined to make one sound. You have to move your jaw bone to say them and students find them strange so they often exchange a double vowel for a single one. They may pronounce train /tren/ instead of /trein/ However, good use of double vowels really helps in creating a more native sounding accent.
Phoneme Examples
/iə/ ear, beer, merely, career
/ei/ mate, weight, daytime, ace
/υə/ pure, sewer, cruel, fuel
/ɔi/ destroy, ointment, boiling, buoy /əi/ oh, photo, motor, loan
/eə/ rare, bear, malaria, heir
/ai/ my, wider, style, pile
/aυ/ loud, cow, plough, ouch
Saying consonants
Many of the consonant phonemes look exactly like the alphabet but you need to check, as a significant number may be new to you or misleading. So look at the example words to make sure that the sound matches your expectations. Take /j/ for example. It’s pronounced like y in yacht not j in jump.
Different versions of the phonemic chart exist. They always show the same phonemes but in different orders. Say the phonemes out loud in the order I show them here and you notice that they’re grouped according to the speech organs you use to make them. For example /p/ and /b/ both use the upper and lower lips.