120 hr. TEFL Course Module 5-Speaking (Pt.2 Sounding out New Words)

Module 5: Speaking

5.1 Sounding out words

Although we already discussed sounds in the module on reading, we will focus more attention on helping your students actually sound out words. We will start with a specific overview of phonetics.

5.1.1 Phonetic symbols

As you know, phonetics is the study of sounds and human speech. What we did not discuss earlier, is that phonetics has its own language made up of the most common phonemes in the English language. While your students do not need to know these phonetic symbols to be able to read or speak, it can be helpful when trying to teach how to pronounce English words. Here is the basic rundown of phonetic symbols:

Consonants:

Symbol	Examples
p	pen, copy, happen
b	back, baby, job
t	tea, tight, button
d	day, ladder, odd
k	key, clock, school
g	get, giggle, ghost
tʃ	church, match, nature
dʒ	judge, age, soldier
f	fat, coffee, rough, photo
v	view, heavy, move
θ	thing, author, path
s	soon, cease, sister

Symbol	Examples
z	zero, music, roses, buzz
ʃ	ship, sure, national
ʒ	pleasure, vision
h	hot, whole, ahead
m	more, hammer, sum
n	nice, now, funny, sun
ŋ	ring, anger, thanks, sung
L	light, valley, feel
R	right, wrong, sorry, arrange
j	yet, use, beauty, few
w	wet, one, when, queen
ʔ	department, football