Teach english new edition r

1
ship sheep
2
heart hard
For each number, they hear a sentence and they have to circle the word they hear 
in each case. (For example, 1 ‘Yesterday I saw a large 
sheep
in the field’, 2 ‘Being in love is 
so 
hard
’). We can then model the words. In the case of the vowels, we will make sure the 
students take note of the lip position for ‘ship’ (spread loosely) and ‘sheep’ (stretched). 
W ith the two consonants, they need to know that whereas /t/ (e.g. ‘two’, ‘touch’, ‘heart’) is 
said with the vocal chords open, 
Id/
(e.g. ‘do’, ‘hard’) is said with the vocal chords closed. 
The result is that /d/ is a 
voiced 
consonant (because the air vibrates as it passes though the 
closed chords) whereas /t/ is 
voiceless 
because there is no such constriction (see page 62). 
Students then say the words and their classmates have to decide which sound they were 
using.
M inimal pair exercises like this can be used with any age and, depending on what 
particular words, sentences and phrases are used, at any level. Once again, drawings and 
cards will help young children, just as getting them to stand in different groups depending 
on the sounds in words which they have written on cards may help the more 
kinaesthetic
learners 
(see page 16).
| | l Sounds and spelling: 
a m ajor cause of difficulty for some students of English is 
the apparent lack o f correspondence between sounds and spelling. The following 
procedures show ways of dealing with this. In the first, we give students lists of 
words with a certain spelling (e.g. the letter com bination ‘ou’ in ‘rough’, ‘tough’, 
‘ought’, ‘bought’, ‘though’, ‘through’, etc). They have to group the words according 
to the different ways ‘ou’ is pronounced. A second idea is to give students a list of
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Teaching the language system
words (e.g. ‘won’, ‘sum m er’, ‘son’, ‘plunge’, ‘under’, etc) and ask them to say which 
sound (in this case /
a
/) occurs in all of them, before getting them to repeat the 
words and then think of others which contain the same sound.