By Jennie Parker

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Ready for the answers? The following words contain the /tʃ/ sound: chair, cello, situation, catch, and cappuccino. How’d you do?  In this month’s blog, we’re going to look at how to form the /tʃ/ sound correctly, and then we’ll look at phonics rules to help you predict which words contain the sound.
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First, to form the sound correctly, it may be helpful to think of it as a combination between /t/ and the SH (/ʃ/) sounds. In other words, stop the air flow, as in “t,” and then go into an SH sound. To do so, pucker your lips – as in “duck face” – and place the tip of your tongue on the roof of your mouth behind your front teeth. Use your tongue placement to stop air flow, and then release it. It’s important to stop the air flow before releasing it; if you don’t do so, you will be producing the SH sound, not the CH sound.
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Try the following minimal pair list: Listen
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​/tʃ/ CH                              ​/ʃ/ SH
chip                                    ship      
cheap                                sheep
chair                                  share
choose                              shoes
March                               marsh
watch                                wash
witch                                 wish
crutch                                crush
watcher                            washer
latching                             lashing

​Another sound that CH is similar to is /dʒ/ or the J sound, as in jam and jump. Tongue and lip placement are the same for both sounds; the difference is that CH is a voiceless sound, which means your vocal chords are not vibrating, and J is a voiced sound, which means they are. Another key difference between the two is that vowels preceding CH are shorter than the vowels preceding J. 
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Let’s try the following minimal pair list: Listen
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​/tʃ/ CH          /dʒ/ J
rich                  ridge    
H                      age
search           surge
March           Marge
batch             badge
perch             purge

Okay, so you can make the CH sound. But how can you recognize it?  Of all the CH sounds found in English, roughly three-fourths of them are spelled with “ch” or “tch,” and one-fourth are spelled with “tu.” Only 1% appear as “c” or “cc.”

Most of the time, when you see “ch,” it is pronounced /tʃ/, as in which and much. However, the “ch” in words derived from Greek are pronounced /k/, as in chemistry and school, and the “ch” in words derived from French are pronounced like SH, as in Chicago and champagne.

With regard to “tu,” you’ll hear the true /t/ sound at the beginning of a word (e.g., Tuesday), after "s" (e.g., student), or at the start of a stressed syllable (e.g., return). However, in most other instances, you'll hear the CH sound (e.g., situation, adventure, culture, virtual).

Finally, the “c” or “cc” followed by an “e” or an “i” in words derived from Italian are pronounced CH as in cello and concerto. Otherwise, “c” is usually pronounced as /k/, as in cake or /s/, as in slice, and “cc” is usually pronounced /k/, as in acclaim.

You may not always know from where a word is derived, and that’s okay. English is a giant mess of borrowed words, and even native speakers don’t always know how a word is pronounced unless they’ve heard it before. See The Labyrinth of English Spelling and Pronunciation for more on how English spelling and pronunciation evolved as it did. 

Please let me know in the comments whether this blog was helpful. I’d also love to hear your questions about other sounds or aspects of English – they could be a future blog post! For live, face-to-face assistance with /tʃ/ and other sounds, please see our Lunch Break: Pronunciation Workshop schedule and our private coaching services.

by Jennie Parker

Was it difficult? If so, let’s work on tongue and lip placement when making the American /r/ sound. Then we’ll take a look at the vowel sounds that precede “r.”

First, your tongue should be high in the mouth and pulled back with the sides of your tongue touching the inside of your back molars. To help with this positioning, make the /i/ sound, as in "seed" or "be." Notice the contact your tongue makes with your mouth. Hold the /i/ sound, and then slide your tongue back, along the inside of your upper teeth. The /i/ sound will change to /r/. Do this a few times, and /i/ + /r/ will start to sound like "ear."

​Second, there should be no trilling or rolling of the tongue, as in the Spanish “rr” sound. In other words, you should feel no vibration of the tongue. Focus on keeping the tongue steady.  Say the following words, focusing on the placement of your tongue:          red          art          car          ready          artist          barber

​Next, your lips should be puckered – not quite a kiss – more like “duck face.”

If you are more accustomed to British English, you may be softening or omitting the /r/ at the end of a syllable. In British English, when “r” comes after a vowel in the same syllable (as in star, herd, hornet), the /r/ is omitted. However, in American English, the “r” is always pronounced. Words ending in “r,” for example, should leave you with “duck face.”

Another tricky aspect of the American “r” is the vowel that comes before it. As you know, the pronunciation of vowels in English is tricky; while there are only five vowels, there are approximately 14 vowel sounds. However, when a vowel comes before an “r,” its sound is somewhat distorted; we call these “r-colored vowels.” In American English, there are only four sounds that a vowel + r make, but many different spellings, as the chart below illustrates. Practice these words, keeping in mind that each row reflects the same sound. And note that words like "ear" are formed /iɚ/ but sometimes represented as a fifth r-colored vowel.

Please let me know in the comments whether this blog was helpful. And also let me know if you’re having trouble with other sounds; they could be a future blog post! For live in-person assistance with /r/ and other sounds, please see our Lunch Break: Pronunciation Workshop schedule and our private training services.

Words in English that do not contain these sounds should not cause vibration in your nose. Try saying these words while, again, touching your nose.

backpack, laptop, lawsuit, traffic, culture

If you’re feeling vibration when saying words that do not contain nasal sounds, then your voice is taking on a nasal-sounding quality. This could be caused by interference from your first language or because you are not producing a full range of motion with your jaw, lips, and tongue.

How can you decrease nasal resonance? The following exercises will help:

1. Explore how the soft palate works with a mirror. While looking into a mirror, open your mouth wide. Make the “k,” “g,” and “ng” sounds, watching your soft palate move.
2. To lower your voice, imagine speaking from your breastbone area. Practice introducing yourself, imagining your voice radiating from your chest.
3. Alternate between nasal and non-nasal sounds.  Hold the sounds, thinking about where the sound is coming from and touching your nose. Try these combinations:
   1. “m” vs. “v”  (“mmmmmmm” vs. “vvvvvvvvvv”)
   2. “n” vs. “l”
   3. “ng” vs. “g”
4. Practice speaking while fully aware of the movement of your jaw, lips, and tongue. The nasalization of non-nasal sounds often occurs when the jaw is not lowered enough or the tongue is not placed properly.  The /æ/ sound, as in apple, is a good sound to start with because it requires a wide mouth and a dropped jaw. Say the /æ/ sound in a mirror. Compare your mouth to that in the image below from the University of Iowa’s Sounds of Speech.  Practice these words, which contain /æ/:  black, drag, flag, chap, tax, bath

By Jennie Parker

Mid-semester, my students, who came to the U.S. from many countries, including Colombia, Mexico, Italy, China, South Korea, and Ivory Coast, gave oral presentations. The main learning objective was to deliver a well-prepared, organized, coherent presentation. A secondary objective was to address English language skills. As part of this, I designed a special section of the rubric where I listed mispronounced words and their corrections.

I will never forget a student from China who spoke clear English with a Mandarin accent. Though she had presented beautifully and earned an A, when I handed back her feedback, her face got red, and her hand shot up in the air. She scolded me in front of the class for implying that her accent was “wrong” and somehow inferior to mine.
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I was taken aback. That was certainly not what I had intended to do, and the only reference to accent at all on the rubric was implicit: the list of mispronounced words and their corrections. I thought I was helping her and her classmates to communicate more clearly with their North American peers and professors.

Was I wrong to include pronunciation? I felt ashamed for having offended her, but also confused. Wasn’t part of my job as an ESL instructor to address pronunciation? If so, how could I have done so in a way that would have been better received? The search for these answers led me to a wealth of sociolinguistics literature on accent.

First, let’s be clear, we all speak with an accent. The way we pronounce vowels and consonants and apply word stress, rhythm, and intonation all contribute to what is our accent. In the United States, the majority of people speak English with an accent referred to as General American English; most Americans would say this accent lacks any distinctive characteristics, and it may be erroneously described as “unaccented.” In addition to this standard accent, some estimate there are roughly 24 additional nonstandard accents in the United States, which may point to a speaker’s regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics. But when you think of English as a global language, for it is spoken by nearly 1.5 billion people around the world, the number of accents increases to roughly 160.

So, which accent is correct? No governmental or royal society exists to regulate the English language, and most linguists would agree that there is no one correct, valid English accent. Well, then, which accent is most desirable? That depends on the listener. Own-accent bias suggests that people prefer to hear their own accent. Accent helps us to distinguish our in-group from out-groups. The logic goes, those who speak like us are the most similar to us. But is that true?

Our perceptions of others’ accents depend on our social and cultural associations with that accent. In other words, accent triggers our stereotypes of a speaker. According to accent prestige theory, accents are used as cues to judge characteristics of speakers. More specifically, these characteristics can be divided into two categories: status (including intelligence, education level, social class, competence, and level of success) and solidarity (including friendliness, trustworthiness, and kindness). Studies have shown that the standard accent is rated higher in both categories by people who speak the standard accent (such as General American in the U.S.). However, those who speak with a nonstandard accent also give higher ratings to those who speak with a standard accent in the status category, but rate those who speak with an accent similar to their own higher in the solidarity category.

Since moving from the Midwest to the South over 20 years ago, I’ve become more sensitive to how some of these stereotypes tend to play out in movies. It seems that oftentimes, characters with a Southern accent in film and animation are friendly but dim-witted. Think Mater in Cars. In contrast, British accents in American theaters are often correlated with prestige or intelligence. Think James Bond.

Unfortunately, in the real world, these accent biases create opportunities for discrimination. John Baugh, a linguistics professor at Washington University, coined the phrase, “linguistic profiling,” which refers to discriminating against a person based on auditory cues, such as dialect and accent. His studies have shown that ethnicity can often accurately be determined from short speech samples – as short as “hello” – and that those who speak with a dialect or accent devalued where they live may fall victim to discrimination in areas such as housing, banking, and medicine. I remember a friend’s British husband joking that in the process of becoming an American citizen, whenever he had to go through security checkpoints in government buildings, he just had to say “hello” and was waved through, avoiding the scrutiny that others endured. Of course, more than auditory cues may have contributed to the guards’ prejudices, but I thought of Baugh’s studies.

Perpetuating accent bias is a real danger of accent training. Awareness should be raised as to the concept of accent bias: of course, a speaker’s accent is not actually an indicator of his intelligence, success, or trustworthiness, for example, but it can elicit social evaluations, perhaps even unconsciously, that put him at an unfair advantage or disadvantage. And completely changing one’s accent to suit the environment is neither easy nor desirable for most. Accent training should, therefore, be approached sensitively with these issues in the minds of both the accent coach and the client.

Certainly, the concept of accent is heavy with meaning: identity, stereotypes, a source of pride or stigma. Yet, another aspect of accent is often overlooked in discussions on it: intelligibility. One’s accent consists of features that trigger far less of an emotional response: pronunciation, word stress, rhythm, and intonation.  To a large extent, these features need to be addressed in language education to help learners be understood. It’s been nearly a decade since I taught that FE class.  In that time, I’ve taught pronunciation (or accent) to thousands of English language learners living in the U.S. who fall up and down the socioeconomic scale, with education levels ranging from little to no formal education to post-graduate degrees. Their feelings on accent have ranged from pride in their native accent to pride in cultivating a General American accent, as well as learners who have given accent identity little to no thought. While anecdotal, I feel comfortable drawing the following conclusion with a degree of certainty: despite their differences, all of these learners want to be understood.

With that in mind and with all I’ve learned about accent and its weight, I’ve devised a simple two-pronged test when it comes to providing feedback on pronunciation. The first question I ask myself is if the feedback is solicited. In other words, has the learner come to me specifically for accent or pronunciation work, or has she come to me with another primary goal, such as fluency or grammar improvement? Next, if the feedback is solicited, I ask myself whether it is necessary. I can only know if it is necessary if I know learners’ goals. Over the years, most have told me that they want to be better understood in English; others have said that they want listeners to focus more on the content of their message and less on the delivery. Far fewer have said that they want to speak English like a North American. These goals determine whether my feedback is necessary. That is, am I providing a correction that improves intelligibility or am I correcting every phoneme that is inconsistent with a General American accent?

When I think back to the FE section that I taught, my pronunciation feedback failed the two-pronged test. The student who was rightly upset with me hadn’t solicited my feedback on pronunciation. Registering for a freshman experience course is very different from registering for an English pronunciation class. I imagine pronunciation feedback was nowhere on the published course description. Second, I hadn’t asked her about her learning goals as they relate to pronunciation, and, furthermore, I would have readily admitted that her English was already highly intelligible. But I gave her feedback, anyway, exposing my unconscious bias that my standard accent was the correct one.
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I cringe when I think back on that experience now (and if you’re reading this, dear student, please accept my sincere apologies). Over the years, I’ve come to regard accent training as moving along a continuum that stretches from unintelligible to intelligible speech for a target audience. The continuum looks different for each English speaker because the audiences may be different and what lies at the very end of the intelligibility scale is the speaker’s target accent. That target may be speaking intelligible English with a Spanish accent, for example, or it may be speaking English with a General American accent, or Received Pronunciation (i.e., the standard British accent), or any of the other over 150 English accents around the globe.  Thus, an effective accent training program must be learner-centered and highly customizable.

By Jennie Parker

​So, just how important are rhythm and intonational patterns to the intelligibility of English? In today’s literature on the subject, linguists are divided. Some claim that suprasegmental elements of speech (that is, features of speech that extend beyond individual sounds, such as word stress, rhythm, and intonation) are more important than the correct articulation of consonants and vowels. Others, however, claim that segmentals – these consonant and vowel sounds - are most important.  A third, more holistic perspective, and one that I embrace, is emerging. It suggests that the debate between suprasegmentals and segmentals is perpetuating a false dichotomy; the interaction between the two affects intelligibility, and they cannot always be separated.

​The first perspective points to studies that suggest that suprasegmentals, or prosody, play the most vital role in the overall intelligibility of speech. For example, English rhythm and intonation patterns provide information about what is important to a speaker’s message. Use of correct rhythm and intonation patterns is correlated with better intelligibility, higher proficiency ratings by native speakers, and better listener comprehension and recall. In contrast, nonnative rhythm and intonation patterns, including misplaced focus or stressing all words in an utterance equally, may elicit negative evaluations of the speaker and make sentence processing more difficult for the listener.

In contrast, other studies suggest that the correct articulation of phonemes has a larger impact on intelligibility than suprasegmentals. This may be especially true with regard to interactions between nonnative speakers of English. Because there are more nonnative speakers of English in the world than native speakers, some argue that more studies should assess the intelligibility of the speech of nonnative speakers speaking to other nonnative speakers (most studies involve nonnative speakers speaking to native speakers). Some studies suggest that when nonnative speakers employ correct elements of prosody, nonnative listeners actually have a more difficult time understanding what is said.

I tend to agree with a third, emerging perspective, however. In my experience, the interaction between segmental and suprasegmental elements of speech affect intelligibility, and sometimes, the two cannot be separated. For example, for native speakers of Mandarin and Japanese, a common communication problem in English is the insertion of a vowel sound between consonants in consonant clusters or after consonant clusters. So, while the vowel insertion is of a segmental nature, it involves syllables and word stress, as well. Thus, it is important for pronunciation instruction to address both segmental and suprasegmental elements. Furthermore, because language transfer issues differ depending on a learner’s first language, it is imperative for language educators to be able to shift instruction to address elements of speech that are most significantly impacting intelligibility for individual learners.

So what does all of this mean for the English language learner? It's important to address both segmentals (i.e., consonant and vowel production), as well as suprasegmentals (including word stress, rhythm, and intonation) in your English language instruction. An effective language instructor will research or have experience with common transfer issues from your first language and be able to assess your own speech for what is interfering most significantly with intelligibility. He or she will then help you to address those issues first in controlled language exercises and then in spontaneous speech.

Cemetery.  I'll never forget its spelling because it's the word I missed in the second-grade spelling bee. The concept of spelling bees - spelling competitions - or even explicit spelling lessons may be foreign to you if you speak a highly-phonetic language, such as Turkish, Spanish, Czech, or Italian. English orthography, however, is highly nonphonemic.  How did English become such a mess? It's a long tale of borrowed letters and words, phonological shift, and the lack of a governing body overseeing the consistency and expansion of the language.

Let's start around the 5th Century AD. After the Romans left England, Germanic tribes invaded and settled, forming what became known as Old English from various West Germanic dialects. By the 6th Century, the Roman alphabet was adopted to express the language in written form, but there were more sounds than letters, leading to one of the first issues with English spelling.

In addition to juxtaposing the Roman alphabet onto English, which was problematic but not uncommon, we have the issue of words borrowed from other languages. With the Norman invasion of England beginning in 1066, French became the language of the English aristocracy, while the lower classes continued speaking English. French words related to politics and legislation, for example, such as evidence, justice, and soldiers, entered the English language.  Sometimes spelling was adapted to match pronunciation, and sometimes pronunciation was adapted to match French spelling, leading to more confusion.

The influence of other languages on English continued with the introduction of the printing press in 1476.  While the printing press ushered in a desire for spelling consistency, it actually led to more confusion. Many printers were Dutch, and they sometimes used Dutch spellings for words, such as ghost with its silent "h."  Over the next couple of hundred years, scholars attempted to standardize English by writing spellling guides. However, there was little collaboration or agreement, so these early attempts were futile. Some wrote guides that were descriptive, reflecting how people actually wrote the language. Others were more prescriptive, devising rules and standards for the way people should write the language.

Around this time, English was also going through what would become known as the Great Vowel Shift (roughly 1400-1700). The cause of this shift is debated, but it resulted in a change in the way Middle English long vowels, as well as a few consonants, were pronounced. For example, the word bite had been pronounced "beet," and the word meat had been pronounced "met" before the Great Vowel Shift. Many scholars attribute the nonphonetic nature of English primarily to this Great Vowel Shift.

To make matters even more complicated, in the 16th and 17th centuries, scholars began borrowing words from Latin and Greek for scientific and technicial concepts and altering English spelling to reflect the classical roots of words. For example, "det" became debt from the Latin debitum.  And, conversely, across the Atlantic, in 1828, Noah Webster published the first dictionary of the American English language, putting an American spin on the language by removing some of the French influence on words.  For example, "colour" became color, and "centre" became center in American English.

Finally, as English language learners know, English is truly a global language.  It is estimated there are over 400 million native English speakers in the world and over one billion people for whom English is a second language. And while there is some consensus as to what constiutes both standard written English and standard regional accents, there is no royal, governmental, or international regulatory body overseeing the rules of English or the expansion of the language.  English remains open to the influence of other languages, phonological shifts, and tension between prescriptivists and descriptivists in areas such as grammar, spelling, pronunciation, and the inclusion of new words.

 So, don't feel badly if you have trouble pronouncing English. Even native English speakers may have a difficult time pronouncing a word that is new to them. When in doubt, I check the pronunciation in a dictionary, but I am also familiar with phonological guidelines that dictate correct pronunciation much of the time. I've compiled the guidelines here to help you out.  Please comment below if you have questions, and I'll do my best to answer quickly!

​I also think of “schwa” as lazy because we turn many unstressed syllables into the “schwa” sound. In fact, roughly 20% of words in English contain a “schwa.” The sound can be spelled with any vowel, as in relative, elephant, mistake, today, and difficult, and a few vowel combinations, as in motion. So, within a word, unstressed syllables are often shortened to “schwa;” in addition, within a sentence, unstressed words (i.e., function words) are often shortened to “schwa,” as well. (See “Understanding the Rhythm of English” for more on rhythm and function words).

In these examples, the vowels in many of the function words are reduced to “schwa.” Remember, function words include articles, prepositions, pronouns, and positive auxiliaries.

For some fun facts about “schwa,” see language blogger and linguist Arika Okrent’s post, which describes “schwa” as the laziest sound there is! https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/56821/9-fun-facts-about-schwa
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*the same sound is also sometimes represented as /ʌ/ when the syllable is stressed, as in under and Doug.

One of the most pervasive pronunciation problems in English is the distinction between /i/, as in "sheep," and /ɪ/, as in "ship." Your first language will influence whether you can easily hear and articulate the distinction between these two vowel sounds. This distinction is very clear to native English speakers, and many words lose their intended meaning if the wrong sound is substituted.  The following list of minimal pairs gives you an idea of why it is so important to pronounce these vowels correctly (and it also provides good listening practice):

The /i/ phoneme is an example of a tense vowel.  When articulating tense vowels, the muscles in your lips and tongue should be tense, or tight. To make the /i/ sound, open your mouth slightly, and move your tongue high towards the roof of your mouth and forward towards your front teeth (but not touching your teeth). The sides of your tongue should be pressing the roof of your mouth.  We particularly like the Sounds American channel for phoneme practice.  I've posted the /i/ video below.

/ɪ/, however, is a lax vowel. The muscles in your lips and tongue should be relaxed.  To make the /ɪ/ sound, open your mouth slightly, and move your tongue high towards the roof of your mouth and forward.  Your tongue should be relaxed and not touching your teeth or the roof of your mouth. The Sounds American video is below:

Spelling in English can be tricky. The /i/ sound is most often spelled with a "y," as in pretty, lady, and kitty.  The /ɪ/ is most often spelled with an "i," as in brick, middle, and lid.  Please see our Sound Chart for a more complete list of spellings.