That Brab Pitt is well fit! - dealveolar assimilation

Lizz: That Brab Pitt is well fit!

Vee: I see what you mean but he's no Tog Carty.

Lizz: Off EastEnders? Give over Vee!

Now, we all know that 'Brab' is 'Brad' and 'Tog' is 'Todd' but why does this happen?

Hold on, you don't believe me? Read this sentence and think about the position of your lips and tongue when you get to the end of their first names:

Brad Pitt is fitter than Todd Carty.

Hopefully you found that your lips came together at the end of Brad and the back of your tongue touched your velum* for Todd. This is because both names end in alveolar plosives; /t/ and /d/. Phonemes made in this position are rather susceptible to shifting around depending on the following consonant - this is known as dealveolar assimilation. Here's the rules:

A word ending…	coming before a word beginning…	changes to end…
/t/	/k/ or /ɡ/	/k/
/d/	/k/ or /ɡ/	/ɡ/
/t/	/p/ or /b/	/p/
/d/	/p/ or /b/	/b/
/n/	/k/ or /ɡ/	/ŋ/
/n/	/p/ or /b/	/m/
/n/	/m/	/m/

Why is this important? 

I often find that even the most proficient students can become robotic when speaking because they don't link words together. By teaching them to do this, and making them look out for it, you're helping them sound less Johnny 5 and more alive!

Johnny 5 is alive!

Try the following sentences. Make sure that your students do not release the first assimilated phoneme but rather hold the position for a short time - remember you're practising connected speech!

1. The hot camel had a tiny hump.
2. Bad girls have more fun.
3. I hate bears and penguins.
4. The freed prisoner went to the pub.
5. Ten gorillas marched into town.
6. Don't bin bananas when they're brown, bake them!
7. Too much fake tan makes you look terrible.

You could also do this as a dictation exercise; read the sentences a few times each at normal speaking rate and ask the students to write down what they hear. This type of activity will help them with those nasty gap fill exercises in IELTS and Cambridge exams.

* for velum see previous post 'I good like a cup of tea'.

I good like a cup of tea. /w/ vs. /ɡ/

Lizz: What would you like to drink?

Miguel: I good like a cup of tea.

Lizz: Hmmm...

Just a quickie before breakfast. The phonemes /w/ and /ɡ/ are both made using the back of the tongue and the velum. If you're not sure what that is, put your tongue tip on the roof of your mouth just behind your teeth. Then, keeping contact, draw it back in your mouth at far as you can manage - you should hopefully end up at a fleshy bit without bone, this is your velum. 

For a /w/, the back of the tongue moves close to the velum but does not touch it. For a /ɡ/, on the other hand, the back of the tongue does make contact with the velum. Now, controlling the back of your tongue is not an easy thing; poor Miguel won't take kindly to you shouting 'Stop touching your velum!' Let's face it, like most of us, he probably won't know what it is either. Luckily there's a quick fix. Here's how:

1. Try producing a /uː/, how does it feel? Bit like a /w/ probably. These two phonemes are very similar, both involve lip protrusion (love that word!) and the back of the tongue moving towards the velum.

2. Ask Miguel to produce an /uː/. Now tell him to replace the /w/ in 'would' with an /uː/ he'll hopefully give you something like /uːwʊd/. Practice a few more times and remind him of this after every 'good' you hear. 

3. Ta da!!!!! Phonetics = magic. Fact.

This time next week I'll be lying on a bitch: /iː/ vs. /ɪ/

Lizz: What will you be doing this time next week Ri?

Ri: This time next week I'll be lying on a bitch.

Lizz: Lucky you!


It's the shit vs. sheet dichotomy, a classroom favourite bound to give you the giggles and perhaps a red face as you unravel the above conversation for a 45-year-old Laotian! I'm yet to find a pronunciation guide that deals with this sufficiently, so let's look at the /ɪ/ /iː/ distinction. We’re all told that the colon-like diacritic means that it’s a long sound but that doesn't really provide the whole picture. What we’re actually dealing with in phonetic terms is a distinction between tense and lax vowels; /iː/ is tense and /ɪ/ is lax. You can think of these terms exactly as they sound, so provide more muscle tension for /iː/ and relax slightly for /ɪ/.

Here's how to teach it:

1. Start with /iː/. This is a close-front vowel meaning that the body of the tongue should be pushing towards the arched part at the roof of your mouth and the gap between this and your tongue is minimal. 
2. Smile broadly, bear your teeth, stretch your lips out wide and don't forget to emphasize the muscle tension. I like to accompany my model with hand gestures - I like this because it saves me from slicing my head in half to reveal the cross section - a circumstance also appreciated by my boyfriend.
3. Now for /ɪ/. Starting from /iː/ relax your facial muscles, drop your smile slightly; your jaw will also come down a bit but this is minimal, you don't want to over-emphasize this.
4. Now get the students to practice. Make them do the hand gestures while they produce the voicing too. They should make the tense vowel slightly longer than the lax one but don't go crazy, nobody says 'This time next week I'll be lying on a beeeeeeeeach.'

/iː ɪ iː ɪ iː ɪ iː ɪ iː ɪ iː ɪ iː ɪ iː ɪ iː ɪ/

What's it all about then?

Dear readers,

I wanted to start blogging so that I can write down all the stuff that I call upon daily in my job as an EFL teacher. For me, the highlight of any lesson is pronunciation input. There's a magic moment when a student learns how to produce a schwa /ə/ or link together two words with that intrusive /r/, even just getting the intonation right on a tag question can have a huge effect on their ability to communicate. We all strive to gift our students with language but sometimes we need a bit of advice or a cheeky tip to fix Miguel's 'I good like some help with my pronunciation'. I recently finished my MA Phonetics dissertation and was not surprised to find in my research that pronunciation is marginalised in the classroom. Worse still, many teachers are not actually taught how to teach it anyway! Memories of a solitary two-hour CELTA session spring to mind...

So, if you're with me, I'd like to help. I will be posting regular tips and tricks on the most common problems facing our students. The accent will be British English and, despite being northern myself, I'll mostly stick to the standard southern variety as that's probably what you teach. I welcome suggestions for new topics and will try to answer any questions you might have. Check out my first post 'This time next week I'll be lying on a bitch' coming soon!

Lizzlovesaccents