Lesson 9 Monday 4th May

This was a video lesson, held in the lesson time (Monday 9-11 am) via Meet.

Today was the last formal lesson. Next week, during the lesson time, students can come to try out their material in the Meet system. Everyone should have chosen their topic by now, so anyone who has not must come to see me during office hours on Tuesday 5th May (11.30-1.30) or Tuesday 12th May (11.30-1.30). We went through points on how to lay out material on slides (less is more!), font choice and size (sans serif such as Arial, Helvetica, Liberation Sans, Verdana, font size at least 32), equipment needed (your Presentation on computer and/or  pen drive, notes, hand-outs, printed version of References and print-out of slides 4 or 6 to a page to send to me at end of Presentation, bottle of water + paper cup, tissues), what to do if something goes wrong: relaxation and breathing exercises if struck by panic or you forget what you were going to say next, + look at your notes, use a hand-out if, in real life, the projector refuses to cooperate, or on Meet you can’t get your slides to show. You will be marked both on your material and on your Presentation Skills (including slides) and particularly since this is an English Language exam, make sure you don't make any classic mispronunciations and don't have any grammar mistakes on your slides. We also suggested that neat, smart appearance is to be recommended for the Presentation, as a courtesy to your audience (but don't overdo it!).

For the structure of your Presentation you should be working towards:

1^st slide – your name, title of Presentation, name of course

2^nd slide - Introduction to your Presentation:

What it is about, what topics, in what order, it will cover (how long it will last) - 3 or 4 main points

Slides 3-8/10 - Your material, in same order given on Intro slide

Last slide/Penultimate slide - Conclusion: slide with list of points covered, in order covered

[Optional last slide – Thank you for your attention]

I shall put up some Choice files to book the date and time for your Presentation, after I have consulted with you on Monday 11th. Please remove your name if you discover that you won't be ready in time for the slot you book, since in this way you won't waste our time waiting for you to show up and perhaps somebody else could use the slot. The time slots will be mornings or afternoons and will be for 5 students at a time: each student should be present for the entire time slot and as well as doing their own Presentation, provide the audience for the other Presentations (asking questions) in order to provide as real a Presentation experience and atmosphere as possible.

Please remember all the points we have been over for Presentation Skills also when you (Lingua students) are doing your Presentation for Prof. Samson. There are some differences in techniques between an academic Presentation such as we have been working towards and a tourist Destination Presentation such as is required for Prof. Samson’s exam. We went over some of these:

less formal tone and language, personal references, direct involvement of audience, pictures and colours for slides, warm, emotive, hyperbolic phrases appropriate to persuasive role of this kind of Presentation, using the conventional language of tourism in English.

We went over Singlish, the Colloquial Singapore English which as developed principally as a spoken language in Singapore, which has an English base with a lot of influence from Chinese and Malay in null subjects, omission of verb ‘to be’, topic prominence, no marking for 3^rd person singular present tense verbs or past tenses, particles. Pronunciation is similar to Singapore English: no long verbs, ‘th’ stopping, glottal stop for final /p/, /t/ /k/, syllable timed.

There was only time for a very brief outline of Philippines English (which differently to the other Englishes we have looked at in the course has a base in American rather than British English), mentioning the pronunciation influence of Spanish (following several centuries of Spanish colonisation) in words with ‘st-’ which are pronounced with the addition of /e/ or /ɪ/. It also has ‘th’ stopping and /v/ and /f/ become /b/ and /p/. It is syllable-timed. Taglish, a collquiial form similar in development and role to Singlish, has the other official Philippines language Taglog as its base with influence from English.

We also went over the characteristics of English as a Lingua Franc (ELF), the term Jenkins and other linguists prefer to English as Foreeign Language,:

Grammar:

No marking 3^rd person present tense

No distinction ‘who’/’which’

Omission of articles or insertion of articles

Non-standard tag questions

Adding redundant prepositions: ‘to discuss about’

Over-use of ‘do’, ‘have’ ’make’, ‘put’, ‘take’

‘that clauses instead of infinitive structures: ‘I want that ...’

Redundant explicitness: ‘black colour’

Sound familiar?!

Pronunciation:

All consonant phonemes except dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ and dark /l/.

Vowel length contrasts: /ɪ/ and /i:/

Avoidance of consonant deletion in initial position, certain deletions in medial and final positions: ‘factsheet’ as ‘facsheet’, but not ‘fatsheet’ or ‘facteet’

Avoidance of consonant clusters by insertion of vowel phoneme: ‘film’ goes to /ˈfɪləm/

Placement of tonic stress

Remember to use only reputable academic material for your Topic research. This means material published in books or academic journals which will have been peer-reviewed and material on university websites if put there by members of the teaching staff, not material put up by students. Try ResearchGate and Academia. The University Library has English Today and World Englishes which you should be able to access through proxy.

Any students who have been absent for more than two lessons will need to do some Work to make up their absences (before they can have a final mark for this course. This will be put up in our Section of the page.

Homework:

Work on your Presentation

..

Lesson 6 Monday 30th March

This was a video lesson, held in the lesson time (Monday 9-11 am).
We dealt with Indian English today, one of the Outer Circle (Kachru) Englishes where English has become Institutionalised and functions as the associate national language, primarily for communication between Indians rather than between Indians and native English speakers (though this also happens). It is now a recognised variety of English with its own Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Grammar and Discourse Style. We went over some of the features of Indian English, especially the Pronunciation which is marked by a general shortening of vowels and diphthongs (RP /ɪ/ and /i:/ both pronounced as /ɪ/), the lack of dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/, which are pronounced as plosives /t/ and /d/, pronunciation of /w/ as /v/, geminate consonants in middle of words, rhoticity. In contrast to Standard English, Indian English is a syllable-timed language, not a stress-timed language. We also looked at Vocabulary with compounding of words from English to provide term for culture- specific Indian items (e.g.dining leaf), addition of suffix or prefix to existing English words ('spacy', 'teacheress'), use of indigenous words. For Grammar we noted the lack of marking for plurals, use of specific/non specific rather than definite/indefinite system for articles, lack of marking for past tenses, application of continuous tenses to stative verbs, change of word order in noun phrases, invariant question tags ('no?', 'isn't it?). For Discourse style, the use of polite phrases, deferential language which would be considered excessive by Inner Circle speakers. 

We discussed what you had discovered in your evaluation of radio and television news broadcasts. Most people thought that there was more voice quality and variation in tone, speed and volume in the radio broadcasts than in the television ones, since for the radio the voice had to do all the work of maintaining contact with the audience and making sure the information was communicated effectively whereas for the television the physical sight of the newscaster, as well as background images, meant that facial expression and (limited) body movements established the connection with the audience and kept their attention. A Presentation is halfway between these two experiences, since you will have direct contact with the audience, and some visual aids in the form of slides, but what you will be saying will all be new to them and they will need to be able to understand and assimilate, as well as trusting you.

For Presentation Skills we went over Nerves (pros and cons) and Body language. Nerves can actually be an advantage because feeling anxious about your performance can cause an increase in adrenaline flow making your brain and memory work better!  You can also sue auto-suggestion, telling your self that you have prepared good material, practised carefully, that the audience is interested and friendly and you you will be successful. You should also practise carefully and often as the more you practise the more relaxed you will feel about the Real Presentation and the more your confidence will improve. We talked about relaxation exercises to do before your Presentation and if necessary even duirng it: relaxing your shoulders, breathing deeply and slowly. You should never hunch your shoulders, but keep them relaxed. Adopt a comfortable stance with your feet approx 15 cms apart and your weight equally distributed between them, with slightly more weight on your heels than your toes. Keep your hands by your sides and keep them still, hold a pen or pointer to at least one occupied. Don't look down, but look at the audience and maintain eye contact: not always staring at the same person but moving your gaze around the room - you are communicating with them, after all! Don'r fidget with your hair, necklace, scarf, glasses. Don't move from one foot to the other, don't move backwards and forwards, don't say from side to side.  You need to look relaxed and confident (even if you aren't!).

We talked about your Presentation Topic - the end-of-semester Test will still be Presentation, but very probably on-line, using the Meet facility rather than in a teaching room, but still with slides - which should relate to something we have covered (or have still to cover)) in the lessons. It is time to start thinking about it. I recommended the two Research sites ResearchGate and Academia, both of which are free to use if you log in from your University address. They both have lots of material written by academics so eminently suitable for you to use as Source material.

The next lesson will be on Monday 20th April (Lesson 7) in order to give us time (especially me!) to relax and catch our breath before going on to the last lessons of the course.

Homework for the next lesson (Monday 20th April)

 (i) Practise the confidence, breathing, relaxation and physical stance techniques  outlined in the lesson. Get helpful feedback from a family member or friend: “Do I look relaxed and confident?”

(ii) Listen to at least three of the India voices on the IDEA India voices link in our Section of the page, choosing different ages and gender of the speakers and trying to find speakers who have not lived for significant periods in English speaking countries. The choice is not as wide for India as it was for the Inner Circle countries we have looked at so far. Make notes on the speakers you choose to hand in via the Homework Lesson 6 India voices.link.

(ii)  Look at the material on the British Library link: Indian voices in Britain (British Library)

(iii) Watch the video 'School in the cloud' Ted Talk (1) 

(iv) Watch the video 'Hole in the wall' Ted talk (2)

(v) Watch the video 'What to do with your hands'...

(vi) Begin to think about your Topic for your Presentation:  Remember that it must be approved my me before you start serious work on it. If you want to make  preliminary assessment of what material is available for  o topic, use the two Research sites ResearchGate and Academia. Don't use Google Scholar. Material still to be covered in lessons: South African English Singapore English,, Philippines English. 

Lesson 8 Monday 27th April
This was a video lesson, held in the lesson time (Monday 9-11 am) on Meet,

For Presentation Skills we dealt with End of Presentation and Questions and the importance of continuing to look at the audience and maintain contact with them when soliciting and answering Questions, making sure to look interested and smile.   

The length of your Presentations should be 10-12 minutes and you should use 6-8 slides. At next week's lesson we shall go over structure and  content of Presentation and format of slides, equipment and what to do if something goes wrong.

You should be selecting your Topic now and submitting it to me for approval (via a Meet appointment), as time is getting short. I hope it goes without saying that you should use only English language sources for the material for your Presentations. Use serious academic sources, not Wikipedia or non-peer-reviewed material on the web. Use ResearchGate and Academia which are websites with reputable academic material and are free to use from your unifi email address.

We went over Singapore English, but didn't have time for Singlish too.

Homework

Access the IDEA site via the link in our section of the Moodle page and choose the one Singapore voice and three Philippines recorded voices  to listen to.Make notes on the features you notice and upload them to the Homework file in our Section of the Moodle page.

Lesson 7 Monday 20th April
This was a video lesson, held in the lesson time (Monday 9-11 am) on Meet.
.We went over English in Africa, looking at West Africa, East Africa and South Africa.
There was so much material to cover that we didn't have time to do anything on Presentation Skills! 
Homework
Access the IDEA site via the link in our section of the Moodle page and choose three East Africa or West Africa recorded voices and three South Africa voices to listen to. Make notes on the features you notice and upload them to the Homework file in our Section of the Moodle page.


Lesson 6 Monday 30th March
This was a video lesson, held in the lesson time (Monday 9-11 am) on Meet.

We dealt with Indian English today, one of the Outer Circle (Kachru) Englishes where English has become Institutionalised and functions as the associate national language, primarily for communication between Indians rather than between Indians and native English speakers (though this also happens). It is now a recognised variety of English with its own Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Grammar and Discourse Style. We went over some of the features of Indian English, especially the Pronunciation which is marked by a general shortening of vowels and diphthongs (RP /ɪ/ and /i:/ both pronounced as /ɪ/), the lack of dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/, which are pronounced as plosives /t/ and /d/, pronunciation of /w/ as /v/, geminate consonants in middle of words, rhoticity. In contrast to Standard English, Indian English is a syllable-timed language, not a stress-timed language. We also looked at Vocabulary with compounding of words from English to provide term for culture- specific Indian items (e.g.dining leaf), addition of suffix or prefix to existing English words ('spacy', 'teacheress'), use of indigenous words. For Grammar we noted the lack of marking for plurals, use of specific/non specific rather than definite/indefinite system for articles, lack of marking for past tenses, application of continuous tenses to stative verbs, change of word order in noun phrases, invariant question tags ('no?', 'isn't it?). For Discourse style, the use of polite phrases, deferential language which would be considered excessive by Inner Circle speakers.          

For Presentation Skills we dealt with Nerves and Body language, going over breathing exercises for relaxation, straightening (not hunching!) of shoulders, relaxed and confident appearance: if you look relaxed and confident, you will feel relaxed and confident! 

Homework
(i) Access the IDEA site via the link in our Section of the Moolde page and choose and listen to three of the Indian voices. Make notes on their features;
(ii) Listen to the Indian voices in Britian on the British Library link;
(iii) Listen to the two 'hole in the Wall' Ted talks vi the links in our section of the Moodle page. 
Upolad your notes on these reordings to th Homework file in our Sction of the Moodle page.

     

Lesson 5 Monday 23rd March

This was a video lesson, held in the lesson time (Monday 9-11 am). From now on, the lessons will be in this form.

You will receive,  via your unifi email, an "invitation" to attend the lesson. Please reply to this and then use the code it contains to access the lesson at 9 am on Monday.

We went over elements of the three Inner Circle (English as a native language) Englishes, Canadian English, Australia English and New Zealand English. In these three countries the Englishes have developed certain features different form Standard British English due to the new things which were found there, often adopting words from the languages of the indigenous peoples,or extending the meaning of an existing Standard British word to make it apply also to the 'thing' found there. We dealt with the relationship of Canadian English with US English and British English and how this reflects the physical proximity with one and the cultural and political proximity with the other. Spelling and lexis tend to follow British English models while Pronunciation tends to follow US models although with certain characteristic difference such as "Canadian Raising", the production of the closing diphthongs  /aɪ/  /aʊ/ to resemble Scottish English pronunciation. We then looked at Australia English and discovered that there is much less lexical difference with standard British English than occurred in Canadian English, except for slang words and expressions and that Pronunciation again differs with some elements coming possibly from the Cockney of some of the earliest settlers such as the diphthongs /aɪ/  which goes to /ɔɪ/ and   /eɪ/  which goes to  /aɪ/. We also dealt with 'clipping' of words to make shorter versions of them: 'barbie' for barbecue', 'arvo' for afternoon, 'Aussie' for Australian.

We then moved on to New Zealand English and noticed the influence of Cockney, Scottish and Irish Englishes as well as the South West Country 'she'

pronoun as generic or impersonal. The move of the short vowels /e/  to  /ɪ/  and /æ/ to  /ɪ/ the raising and lip rounding for the long vowel  /ɜ:/ (reminiscent of Welsh English)  and the presence of some rhoticity. I then played you a video of a news broadcast of the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addressing the nation about the Covid 17 virus. This acted as a transition between the Pronunciation aspects of New Zealand English and the Material on Presentation Skills which made up the second half of the lesson.

We went over aspects of Delivery, the 'performance' of a Presentation, including both voice aspects and non-verbal elements (which will be covered next lesson). Speed and Volume are extremely important and both should be made appropriate to the occasion, size of room, number of people etc. Almost inevitably a novice Presenter (and sometimes not only!) speaks too quickly. This happens especially because feeling nervous and wanting the experience to be over as quickly as possible makes you speak faster. This is why a lot of practice needs to be done to reach the appropriate speed of delivery for a Presentation (approx. 100-110 words per minute). The volume is also important and will depend on the size of the room and the number of people present in it. In both cases (speed and volume) they will be different from ordinary conversation. Practice is needed with feedback from a helpful friend  to establish the appropriate speed and volume.

Office hours Tuesday 11.30-1.30 During the Distance Learning period, book an appointment for office hours (usual time) via email and I'll send you the access code link.

Homework:

(i) Practise reading the Homework Paragraph aloud as though for a Presentation, timing yourself and asking a friend to comment on speed, volume and clarity. Practise until you manage to read it aloud in 1 minute 45 seconds.

(ii) Listen to at least 3 of the Australian voice recordings on the IDEA Australia site 

https://www.dialectsarchive.com/australia   . Choose from the index on the page a variety of different parts of Australia (East, West, North, South - check a map if you need to!) and different ages and gender of speakers. Try to select only Caucasion speakers to avoid interference form other languages/accents. Write down notes on the recodings you listened to with respect to the language and pronunciation features you heard.

((iii) Listen to a news broadcast (in English) on the radio and a news broadcast on the television. Evaluate the delivery according to these questions:

Quality of voice: is it soft, harsh, musical, flat?

Volume and speed: can you hear easily and do you have time to listen, understand and assimilate the information?

Use of voice: does the speaker vary the volume and speed, emphasising key words or facts?

Articulation: can you hear and identify each word, including new and unfamiliar terms?

Silence: does the speaker pause regularly?

Are there any differences between the radio broadcast delivery and the television broadcast delivery?

You could try the Exercise on Italian radio and television news broadcasts if you can't access anything in English, but remember that in this case old news can be good news, you don't necessarily need something current as we are interested in form not content.

(iv) Optional but useful: Watch and listen again to the broadcast by Jacinda Ardern noticing both the NZ pronunciation features we went through but also her Delivery technique. Jacinda Ardern broadcast

Lesson 4 Monday 16th March

on-line lesson

The lesson is available in 4 separate files of slides with 4 separate files of audio commentary.

ASE Lesson 4 Part 1

Audio ASE Lesson 4 Part 1

ASE 2 Sem. Lesson 4 Part 2

Audio ASE Lesson 4 Part 2

ASE 2 Sem. Lesson 4 Part 3

Audio ASE Lesson 4 Part 3

ASE 2 Sem. Lesson 4 Part 4

Audio ASE Lesson 4 Part 4

Sorry it's so many files, but it made it a little quicker to record and upload.

The lesson deals with the complex subject of Intonation and I showed you Peter Roach's opinion that foreign learners of English can only learn English intonation as a child learns it, by listening to and copying speakers of English - even though he spends five chapter of his Introduction to English Phonetics and Phonology in explaining it! We went through the four hypothesised functions of Intonation: Attitudinal, Accentual, Grammatical and Discourse, discovering how these tend to overlap and not be mutually exclusive. With respect to the Attitudinal function we experimented with the other ways of expressing emotion and attitudes when we speak, using variations in speed and volume, pitch, voice quality, facial expression, gestures. The Discourse function is the most important from the point of view of Presentations in the way in which it can signal to the listener new information  or important rather than secondary information.

Homework

(i) Listen to at least five different recordings of Canadian English at the Idea (International Dialects of English Archive) site:

htpp://www.dialectsarchive.com/canada

Choose from the index on the page a variety of different parts of Canada (East, West, North, South - check a map if you need to!) and different ages and gender of speakers. Try to select only "Caucasion" speakers, not from racism but to avoid having the influence of other national accents.  

Lesson 3 Monday 9th March

On-line lesson

Lesson 2 Monday 2nd March

We went over the 're-' words you had found for Homework and their pronunciation, finding that when the 're' could not be separated from the main part of the work with a hyphen, the stress was on the second syllable (not the 're') and the pronunciation was /rɪ/, whereas when it could be separated the pronunciation was /'ri:/. The example 'recycle' was interesting as it seems that although our theory would imposes /ri, increasingly it is being pronounced /rɪ/, probably because of the frequency of use it ow has and the fact that almost no-one remembers that originally it is 're' = 'do again' word and counts it as a single morpheme verb, especially since 'cycle' is now associated predominantly with 'travelling by bicycle'! 

We collected some of your ambiguous /ɪ/ or /i:/ word sentences. We had all discovered that this was not as easy as we might at first of thought to construct, due to changes required in word form due to grammar or syntax, apart from lexical probability! I contributed some too, like many other people exploiting the classic ship/sheep pair, but also some others:

A competition to win a ship/to wean a sheep

The sheep slip on the tins - what a sin!

The sheep sleep on the teens – what a scene!

Live a bit!/Leave a beet!

I fill a bin/I feel a bean

Don’t hit my chick/Don’t heat my cheek

We studiously ignored the pair starting from 'sheet' since this would have been too rude for our lesson!

We went over the main points from the talk by David Crystal which I was pleased to see you had all managed to access and listen to successfully. We noted the link between language and power (historical, geographical, economic, political) which is responsible for a language becoming a global language, the impossibility of predicting with any degree of certainty shifts in these relationships, the usefulness of a global language for international communication. We mentioned briefly other attempts at invented international languages such as Esperanto and Klingon (interplanetary!) and Tolkien's Elf languages.

We then went on some more problematic vowel phonemes: /e/, /æ/ and /ʌ/, all of which are clearly distinct sounds for native speakers of English but which are often not as clearly distinct for non-native speakers. /æ/ is a strong vowel and appears in monosyllables and stressed syllables of polysyllabic words, so not as the letter 'a' at the beginning of words such as 'appear', 'ago', 'away', 'along', 'about', 'around', etc, which have /ə/. Although /æ/ is always represented graphically as 'a' (with the exception of 'plait' and 'plaid'), 'a' is not always pronounced /æ/!  /ʌ/ has many graphic representations including 'u' (but, much, trust), 'o' (love, above, cover, some, come, Monday, money, mother), 'ou' (young, country, cousin) and is the vowel phoneme for the 'un-' prefix (unhappy, unlucky). We also examined /h/, the unvoiced glottal fricative, which requires a following vowel phoneme to be heard (it can be felt as a puff of air without a vowel phoneme, if you put your hand in front of your mouth as you say it). It is used only at the beginning of syllables (and thus of words), never in the middle or at the end of syllables. The letter 'h' when it appears in these positions is always part of another phoneme:

'-ch' = /ʧ/   ('such')

'-sh' = /ʃ/  ('wash')

'-ph' = /f/  ('photograph')

'-th' =  /θ/ ('breath') or /ð/ ('with')  

The letter 'h' is silent in 'honour' and derivates, 'heir' and 'hour'. In 'hotel' it can be silent or pronounced (/h/) according to personal choice. Be careful of the mysterious Italian-speaker inappropriate addition of /h/ in initial position in words beginning with a vowel phoneme, perhaps as an over-compensation or nervous tic!

We then began think about how many speakers of English there are in the contemporary world and what kind of English they speaker, first tracing the history of the spread of English from the approx. 6 million speakers in England at the beginning of the 17th century, through the first 'diaspora' (Jennifer Jenkins) to other parts of Britain and to North America and the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand (via migration). The second diaspora was then to Africa and Asia (via colonisation). In the first diaspora, new L1 Englishes were produced as a result of the UK dialects taken there and mixed together by migrants, incorporating also indigenous words for local things (principally plants and animals) found there, while in the second diaspora, L2 Englishes were produced based on the existing indigenous languages with the English of the colonisers being superimposed over it.

We can now distinguish four kinds of English:

ENL -English as Native Language

ESL - English as Second Language

EFT - English as Foreign Language

ELF - English as Lingua Franca

Putting speakers of all these Englishes together, over 2 billion speakers of English are estimated to exist in today's world (but only a tiny proportion of these are native English speakers)!

Homework

(i) Read the article by Jennifer Jenkins on English as a Lingua Franca (link in our section of page)

(ii) The disappearing piece of homework - it disappeared from the slide and then also from theses notes! Here it is again:

'Translate' the informal text in our section of the page - Informal to Formal Register text -into a more formal register (to hand in).

Lesson 1 Monday 24th February

We began by talking about the uncertain, yet dramatic, situation of the Corona virus and how it might affect our lessons. Until the University, following instructions from the Ministry of Health, makes a clear statement about closure, we shall carry on as normal. Obviously the situation is evolving rapidly, but let's keep our fingers crossed.

We went over the structure and content of the course and the exam: 9 lessons dealing with production and comprehension of spoken English, covering pronunciation, intonation, register, Presentation skills and World Englishes. The exam will be a short, individual, Presentation on a topic dealt with in the course, chosen by each student, but approved by me, to be made in authentic conditions including an audience and questions. Students are expected to attend lessons and do the homework which will be set each week (obviously depending on the evolution of the virus crisis), for which extra marks maybe gained.

We talked about how Speaking is the Language Skill generally given least attention in language teaching while it is actually the skill most used in first language production and the sill which stygmatizes foreign speakers in the ears of native speakers. We also talked about the model of Pronunciation taught and learnt, Received Pronunciation, and how this although universally comprehensible to all speakers of English is only in fact actively used by a tiny proportion of native speakers (even in the UK). It is therefore quite understandable that foreign speakers encounter tremendous difficulty when hearing other accents. By looking at the features of some of these other Englishes, students will be able to be better equipped to understand them when they hear them. 

We began with Pronunciation, making friends again (for Unifi triennale students) or for the first time (students who did their first degree in other universities but did not do the 1st semester ASE course) the RP Phoneme Chart. After going very quickly over the sounds of all the phonemes we began to look at those which cause particular problems for non-native speakers and mark those who mispronounce them immediately as a foreigner. We looked at Rhoticity, the pronunciation or not of the 'r' in all positions in a word. The first vowel sounds we considered were the /i:/, the /ɪ/ and the /i/. Only the last of these, used to represent the sound of the final 'y' or 'ey' when forming a syllable of words (e.g. happy, carry, money, etc.) is similar to the Italian /i/. The other two are much shorter (/ɪ/) and much longer (/i:/). The contrast in length becomes very evident in the words 'busy' and 'easy: /'bɪzi/ and /'i:zi/. It is important also to remember that the consonant following a vowel phoneme lengthens it (the vowel phoneme) if it is voiced (vocal cords almost closed as air passes through them from the lungs, causing vibration) and shortens it (the vowel phoneme) if it is unvoiced (vocal cords open as air passed through them from the lungs, no vibration). All vowel phonemes are voiced, whereas some consonant phonemes are voiced and some are unvoiced.

Homework

(i) Find five more ‘re’ words pronounced with /ɪ/ and five more ‘re’ words pronounced with /i:/. Where is the stress in each case? (to hand in).

(ii) Read the text "Why native English speakers fail to be understood ..."  (link in Section). Make notes (on a piece of paper to hand in at the next lesson) on the main points covered.

(iii) Watch the video of David Crystal on "...    English as the Global Language"  (link in Section). Make notes (on a piece of paper to hand in at the next lesson) on the main points covered.

(iv) Practise saying the sentence:

"In a minute I shall give the women a biscuit."

(v) Try to invent a phrase which causes ambiguity if the words containing the /i:/ and /or the /ɪ/ are mispronounced.