Pronunciation with Wlodek Barbosa

[Włodzimierz Sobkowiak]

On Wednesday 17th June we covered a lot of material really: (i) practiced the walk-through phonetic grid, (ii) tossed the four-piece dice and read off the dates, (iii) read the homework sentences with [the] in pre-vocalic contexts (examples below), finally (iv) did some one-on-one dictation of some pronunciation-wise hard words. The last activity was done in pairs: one student (speaker) read off the words one by one from a notecard, the other (listener/speller) typed in chat what s/he heard. This was done in private communication channel to avoid confusion. In such a situation mispronunciations usually lead to misspelling or misunderstanding, which was in turn corrected by the speaker in voice, with ensuing discussion of problems. The words were taken from the "60 most common mispronunciations in English" notecard -- to be found on SLActivities.


20 sentences with [the] before a vowel (excerpt)
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(C) Wlodek Barbosa

These sentences have been selected from the Brown corpus, a collection of American texts of about 1 million words. These are sentences containing the definite article [the] right before the following word beginning with a vowel. In this context [the] is pronounced as /Di/, rather than as /D@/. Correct pronunciation of the vowel in this variant of [the] appears to be one of the most common problems of foreign learners of English. Hence, this text is good for practice and testing of this problem.

1. "Plenty", say the experts.
2. A painful stab hit him in the abdomen.
3. And it's far from the end for plastics.
4. From this amount deduct the items indicated below.
5. Holden waved a hand at the empty street.
6. I admire the English lady.