Activity Pronunciation

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a fun two-part speaking activity about happiness. First, have a class discussion with the question of part one and then have students discuss the quotes of part two in pairs.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a fun animals exercise for beginner ESL students focusing on the verb can and can't.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a great speaking activity to develop fluency at Christmas time. Students take turns choosing a question to ask another student in their group.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! Students read the clues and unscramble the words, then match words and pictures and finally they write the clue number near the correct picture.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a cloze test about the history of Halloween and in the text, you can find out the origin of Halloween, its traditions, and symbols more representative. The test consists in a video that pupils have to watch (the link is included in the text) and then they have to fill in the gaps in the text, and finally, they have to answer some questions about the video they have just watched.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a great speaking task to develop fluency for talking about New Year's Eve, the past year, and the year to come. Have your students take turns to choose a card and ask the question to their partner/group.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a great speaking activity is for developing fluency on the topic of Christmas.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences It is not a secret that pronouncing English sounds easily and correctly is a big challenge for non-native speakers. Of course, the complexity of English pronunciation consists not only of particular sounds but also of several other aspects such as intonation, stress, rhythm, and timing. I would like to analyze one of the biggest and most obvious pronunciation problems for Ukrainian speakers of English which, in my opinion, is sound differences and the way of pronouncing sounds. Sound System Articulation Aspiration Are you ready to teach English abroad? Related Articles: This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Hanna H. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT. There are a number...  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a fun Thanksgiving ESL activity for your students. Have them think about what and who they are grateful for this Thanksgiving.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! These speaking cards about animals are ideal for teen ESL students to practice speaking or can be used as class openers or finishers and even as writing prompts.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a fun time filler or end of lesson activity in which students practice vocabulary and quick thinking.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a fun worksheet mainly for elementary school kids with a true or false activity with sentence writing.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! Read the clues and guess the spooky characters from this Halloween activity sheet! Either print it off and use it as a worksheet or read the clues as a time-filler activity.   1. I have four of something. 2. I can jump and leap. 3. It is said that I have 9 lives. 4. I have whisters on my face. Answer: I am a cat.   1. You can buy me or grow me. 2. You can put a candle in me to light me up. 3. Sometimes I can look scary. 4. I am orange and round. Answer: I am a pumpkin. 1. I have sharp teeth. 2. I like to drink a red liquid. 3. I can turn into a flying animal. 4. I sleep inside a coffin. Answer: I am a vampire.     1. I have a pet. 2. I can turn you into a toad. ...  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! Using speaking cards is a great way to encourage conversations among ESL learners. The cards act as guides to give the students a direction in their conversations. Below you will find conversation cards about books and reading for your ESL classroom.   Let's take a look at all of the questions and possible answers. Possible answer: I recently finished reading the first book of the Outlander series. It's a fantastic book about an English woman from 1945 who travels back in time to Scotland in 1745. The story is very compelling and the characters' personalities are very well thought-through. Possible answer: One of my favorite books is "The Da Vinci Code" written by Dan Brown. Even though it is a fictional story,...  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a free, printable writing activity where students practice writing conclusions for a passage about Hawaii.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a fun ESL printable writing activity worksheet for learners of English to practice the past simple tense with both regular and irregular verbs.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Every learner of a foreign language may face pronunciation problems now and then. Languages that belong to one language group have more in common in phonics and are usually easier to learn to pronounce correctly. But such languages as English and Chinese are so different, that Chinese learners (and I bet English speaking learners of Chinese too) often have many difficulties in pronunciation. State of the problem Common pronunciation errors How to correct pronunciation problems Learn how to teach pronunciation effectively! Related Articles: Listen to this blog post: This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Evgeniya S. I have been working in China as a teacher for more than six months now. When I arrived in this country, I hardly knew...  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a fun multi-purpose worksheet to practice writing and speaking skills.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a fun multi-purpose worksheet to practice writing and speaking skills in the third person.     Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This Halloween Roll-A-Story is an old favorite, where students roll dice to determine their story’s character, setting, and conflict. Print it out and give it to your student for a fun, Halloween-themed activity!   Have your students come up with a Halloween story by using this handy roll-a-story activity sheet! Give your students a die and let them roll to get their story’s character, setting, and conflict. Once they filled out all the blanks, they are ready to begin writing their story! Once everyone is done, have them read their stories out loud in front of the class, or organize a spooky story night where the stories are shared.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a fun 5-minute activity for your ESL classroom. Have your students write 3 words per category as fast as they can.     Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! Bring Halloween into your classroom with this fun printable Halloween party word find activity sheet. Practice spooky vocabulary with your students for the ultimate Halloween lesson!   This fun printable Halloween party word find activity sheet is ideal for any ESL and EFL classroom. The students can work on this worksheet either at home or in the classroom. You can have them work on it individually or do it as a fun activity for the whole class!   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

  Whereas stress is typically concerned with one individual word, intonation is generally concerned with the variation in volume and pitch throughout an entire sentence. Intonation carries the message of a sentence. It's particularly important when questioning or agreeing, disagreeing and confirming statements. It's also very important when expressing emotions and feelings. The normal pattern for intonation is the rise-fall. Few examples would be ?I haven't seen him for a week,? or a simple word as ?okay?. With the falling intonation, we?re indicating that we're finished speaking. Again, ?I haven't seen him for a week? and ?okay?. A few more examples would be ?I'll see you at six then,? or a question of information ?How do you spell rough?? These are straightforward statements that...  [Read more]

  In this video we'll be looking at the international phonemic alphabet and how it's used in the classroom. There are other phonemic alphabets but this is the most popular and the system, which is most widely used. You may have seen some of these symbols before as any good dictionary will supplement standard English spellings with the phonemic spellings to aid in pronunciation practice. Here we have a situation where we have what are called phonemes and each phoneme represents a sound within the English language. How is this helpful? Well, what it does is help students understand how to say words rather than simply relying on the often archaic English spellings. To illustrate this point let's for a moment put ourselves in the shoes of our students when trying to understand how to say...  [Read more]

In these videos our grammar expert Linda demonstrates how to correctly pronounce a wide variety of common and not so common words that you might encounter in an English language classroom. Come back regularly as our Ask Linda series is frequently updated.  [Read more]

  A better way to go about imparting how to make sounds or what sounds are utilized in a word, is this international phonemic alphabet. Now we have as mentioned one symbol being used in all the words which share that same sound. Now once we get a little bit more familiar with our phonemic alphabet we can also show how different our different sounds can be as in this symbol for ?ooh?, this symbol for ?ow? and this symbol for ?uh?. Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the...  [Read more]

  Connected speech is also an important element of phonology and it's involved in joining words together in an effect to make our speech more efficient. Some might say it's a product of being lazy but nonetheless it's what we all do and we want all of our non-native speakers to speak as naturally as possible, so we have to be aware of these things. Here are a few of the more common examples. We have linking, dropping, changing and extra lettering. An example of each would be with linking, we link our words together so that they almost in effect become one word. Instead of saying ?What do you want to do,? we typically will say ?Whatdoyou want to do?? Then, we can also have dropping. Rather than pronouncing each and every consonant, we can sometimes, especially in certain accents, drop...  [Read more]

  Here we have a set of five words, which all share one sound: the ?oh? sound, as in ?go?, ?show?, ?dough?, ?note? and ?boat?. They?re five different spelling patterns to tell our students so they can identify when to make the ?oh? sound. We can have a simple letter ?o?, ?ow?, ?ough?, ?o? with the magic ?e? which turns our vowel into what we knew as long sounds and the ?oa? as in ?boat?. Now, for a non-native learner, perhaps they can handle something like this. They remember that these spelling combinations help to produce the ?oh? sound and they can go about their business looking at the words and memorizing this knowing that these spelling patterns will produce the sound ?oh?. Now that?s okay until we get to a situation where we can also have words like ?to?, ?cow? and also...  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This is a fun multi-purpose worksheet to practice writing and speaking skills about a student's best friend.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

  The next thing we should look at is how our consonants are arranged for the top two rows we have P and F at the left side of our chart and G and J at the right side of our chart. They're arranged this way because if we analyze the way we speak we're using the front of our mouth to use these sounds as in ?p? and ?f? and I'm using my lips and my teeth to produce those sounds and as we move to the right on the chart slowly but surely we're making those sounds it towards the back of our mouth. We can use the examples of ?g?. The sound ?g? is produced further back in our mouth than ?p?. The next thing we'll notice about our chart is that some of our symbols are shaded. Notice that none of the symbols in the vowel sections are shaded but only a few are in the consonant section. The...  [Read more]