Pronunciation Of Use

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! In English, "very" is used extensively as an adverb to emphasize that something is of a high degree or intensity. However, there are many single words that can be used to say the same thing more effectively.   When speaking or writing English you can make better use of the language and impress the listener/reader by using individual descriptive words rather than using “very” to show a high degree or intensity. For example: Instead of saying “My friend and I took a ride on the roller coaster and we were very afraid” Say “My friend and I took a ride on the roller coaster and we were terrified”   Instead of saying “I was very nervous about taking my English exam” Say “I was...  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!   The four expressions "many", "much", "a lot of" and "lots of" are widely used but often confused. Let's take a look at their differences and when to use which expression correctly.   The word "many" is used with countable, plural nouns in questions and negative sentences. Example Sentences   "Much" is used with uncountable nouns to indicate a large quantity. It is mostly used in negative questions or sentences. Example Sentences    A lot of means a large number of amount. It can be used for countable or uncountable nouns (negative, positive and question). Example Sentences   "A lot of" and "lots of" have the same meaning and they can be used interchangably; "lots of" means a...  [Read more]

  Alveolar sounds get their name from the fact that the alveolar ridge is being used. Again, that ridge is just behind the front top row of teeth. Here the tongue is on or very very near the alveolar ridge. It's typically the tip of the tongue or what's just behind the tip of the tongue, called the blade of the tongue. Here, we're talking about sounds such as ?t? and ?d?. If you say them at home, you can tell the tip of your tongue is on that alveolar ridge. Again, that's ?t? and ?d?, as well as sounds such as ?s? and ?z?. Again, the blade of the tongue is just near that alveolar ridge but it is very near nonetheless. The two other sounds that make it into this category is the ?l? sound, where the tip of the tongue is very clearly touching that alveolar ridge, as well as ?r? or the R...  [Read more]

  Place of articulation deals with the placement of the vocal organs when producing a sound. Before we can cover the particulars of places of articulation, we'll need to take a look at the various vocal organs and their locations. Moving from the front to the back we'd begin with our lips. We can use both lips in order to create a sound or we can use one of our lips with one of our rows of teeth, usually the top, in order to produce another sound. We also have other sounds, which use both of the rows of teeth. Further back we have what's called the alveolar ridge. That's the bit of the mouth that may get burnt when we're eating a pizza that's a bit too hot and the cheese burns just behind there our top two teeth. That again is the hard bit just behind our top teeth, called the...  [Read more]

  When it comes to manner of articulation, we have six different ways in which our breath is produced in order to make our sounds. We have our plosives, our affricates, fricatives, the nasal sounds, our lateral sound and the approximants. Let's take a look at each individually and see how they differ from one another. First we have our plosive sounds. As the word might indicate we have basically a little explosion of sound with our breath. The plosive sounds are made through a three-step process. First there's a closure somewhere in the vocal tract. Second there's a buildup of air and finally there's a sudden release of that air like a little explosion. If we look at some of the sounds that are made this way we might better understand why they are called plosives. Examples are the...  [Read more]

  And now we have our nasal sounds. There are three nasal sounds and basically the pattern of air that's moving out of our vocal tract has to do with two big instances and that is a closure in the vocal tract. Except aside from the plosives and affricates, what we have is air escaping through our nasal cavity. These sounds include ?m?, ?n? and ?ng?. We're moving from the front of the mouth to the back of the mouth. First with the M sound or the ?m?, we're closing both lips and the air is escaping through the nasal passage ?m?. Next we have our N sound or our ?n? sound. There, the closure is inside the mouth but our tongue is closing up near our alveolar ridge and the air is escaping through the nose. Again that's ?n?. Finally we have our NG sound and the closure there is happening...  [Read more]

hello oh my gosh hello welcome hi linda here from itt back with another live session this week hi guys how are you doing um first of all if you can see me if you can hear me just drop a quick hi into um the comment box we are actually live on facebook and we're also live on youtube at the same time so if you can see me if you can hear me please just let me know and also let me know where you're watching from where are you at right now i am in south korea it is 10 a.m friday morning i'm super excited to be here again so um yeah sometimes there are some technical difficulties i had some issues i think last week so um there was no sound for some reason for for a few seconds so if that happens just let me know and then i can repeat myself or i can fix try and fix the issue so that's why it's...  [Read more]

hey everybody it's lisa here and i'm super glad to welcome you to the weekly live stream by itt um if you don't know me yet um once again my name is lisa and i'm a non-native english teacher from russia i've been working online primarily since 2020 and today um i would like to reach out to you and tell you about um some esl course books uh to pick out for your uh teaching i'm not going to dig into details i'm just going to briefly present my approach how i choose the most appropriate materials but anyways i hope that this topic um will be interesting and helpful so uh stay tuned uh and um let me know that you hear and see me clearly because uh right now i i can see that there are seven people watching but i'm not sure if my equipment works well so uh we've got this comment section uh...  [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, that, these and those are demonstrative pronouns. We use them to point to specific people or things. Demonstrative pronouns are used in place of a noun. We can use same words as demonstrative adjectives.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! Knowing when and when not to capitalize is an important part of writing correct English. Most students quickly learn that you always capitalize the first letter of a new sentence, but what are the other rules?   Although mistakes with capitalization do not generally have a big affect on the readability of your written English, it is important to get it right when writing formally for work or study purposes. Fortunately, the most common rules above are quite clear and straightforward to learn. Below are a few more capitalization rules you should be aware of. Capitalize family relationships when used as proper nouns. Capitalize “Uncle Brian,” and “Grandma Betty”. Do not use capitals when referring to a person’s...  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! This infographic explains 10 modal verbs and their usages with useful examples.   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]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!   The words "neither" and "either" are often confused by English learners around the globe. The word "either" sometimes has a similar meaning as the word "neither" but they are often used incorrectly. Below, we take a look at the differences so you can use (and teach!) these words correctly and with confidence.     When both words are used as adverbs the meaning is almost exactly the same: neither (adverb) used to show that a negative statement is also true of somebody/something else, for example:   “She didn’t remember to bring an umbrella and neither did I.”   A: “I don’t like mushrooms.” B: “Me neither.”   either (adverb) used after negative phrases to state that...  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! In general, the apostrophe s (‘s) serves two functions: to contract words and to indicate possession. Let's take a look at this closely in the infographic below.   The apostrophe s (‘s) serves two functions:     Only add ‘ (just the apostrophe symbol) to a plural noun:     Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [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]

  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]

  There are two issues that need to be stressed when working with the international phonemic alphabet. First is the fact that we are no longer concerned with how a word is traditionally spelled. Additionally we need to stress that we are only concerned with the sounds needed to correctly produce a word. So rather than numerous spellings, which can often be pronounced in different ways, we have one symbol representing one sound. Once we can isolate a sound, rather than juggling various spellings, we can work with our students on how to say that sound. Doing that successfully is related to manner and place of articulation, which will be covered shortly. To get a better understanding of the phonemic alphabet, let's take a look at our chart. In the bottom half of our chart we have our...  [Read more]

  "As mentioned before our four words here all are similar in using the ?b? and ?t? sounds at the end. So we know that those phonemes will be used in spelling each one of those words phonetically. Now what we're left to do is assign a phoneme for our vowel sounds. So if we analyze the word, it's ?e? as in bet. We look at our chart, we see the phoneme which corresponds to that sound and that happens to be the standard ?e? that we all recognize. Here, bet phonetically looks very similar to bet in the Roman script. Now let's take a look at ?i? bit. Now we look at our chart and we see that this symbol represents the ?i? sound and that resembles a capital I not a lowercase I but a capital I and so we've arrived at bit. Now with ?but? we have to find the sound and that corresponds to this...  [Read more]

  Now let's take a look at how we go from traditional spellings into the phonemic spellings. The first step in this process is identifying each unit of sound or each phoneme within a word. Let's look at bet, bit, but, and bought. The only difference in each one of these words is in the vowel sound. We have bet, bit, but and bought. Each word simply uses three sounds. Now we have photo. That's four phonemes. Wow we have taxi. That's five phonemes. We have unite with a hidden phoneme in there being the ?y? sound before anything else. Those are five phonemes as well and now we have a longer word: chemistry. Let's give that a shot. That's eight phonemes used in the word chemistry. Now once we've isolated each sound we want to assign a phoneme for each one of those sounds let's do that...  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! Improve your English writing skills with these alternatives to 16 boring verbs people use all the time!   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! Are you writing about Halloween? Here is a list of descriptive words verbs & nouns you can use when writing about scary subjects.   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

  So let's have a look at some of the more general issues when using the wipe board. Perhaps the most important thing to start with is that we should start with a clean board. Secondly it's always very useful to make a board plan so that you know where things are going to appear on the board by the end of your lesson. It?s very simple to do a board plan. Just take a sheet of paper, which is similar in shape to the board that you're going to use, and then onto that piece of paper decide where all the information that's going onto your board is going to be by the time that you've finished. So a very simple board plan just to show where the information is going to be. Also it's very useful if you make use of tables and columns to separate different areas of your work and in the same way...  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad! When writing emails to coworkers and clients at work, it is essential to use the right lingo. Below we have compiled the most useful, polite and professional email phrases you can use at work.   There are six key components to properly structure a business email in English. These will help you to clearly express your ideas and improve your communication with coworkers and clients: The subject line should be clear, concise, and meaningful. It should summarize, not describe and should not consists of a single word, e.g., Important, Help, or Urgent. You should always use the addressee’s name and title if it is a formal message. However, casual business communications do not always need a formal greeting - they can...  [Read more]

Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!   Let's take a look at how to correctly use "whom" and "whose" in English.   Whom is an object pronoun like  ‘him’, ‘her’, ‘us’, etc. We use WHOM to ask which person receives an action, for example:   Whose is a possessive pronoun like ‘her’, ‘his’, ‘our’, etc. We use WHOSE to find out which person something belongs to, for example:   Register now & get certified to teach english abroad!  [Read more]

  So how do we actually make best use of the course book? Well, just a couple of factors that you need to keep into consideration when using these types of material, use the course book to help you create a balanced lesson in terms of the range of skills that are being taught and the actual types of material within that the grammar or vocabulary. Secondly, don't use it all the time, particularly with things like activities, we can create our own materials and we can tailor those materials much more specifically to the actual class that we're teaching. As very often the actual creations in the book are very general, we can make our own materials much more specific. The third thing you need to be aware of is that you can't always rely 100% on the information that's presented in those...  [Read more]