English Pronunciation Clinic Week 1: Phonemes Video 1: What is a phoneme? Welcome to English Pronunciation Clinic. This week, week 1, we will be investigating phonemes. This is the first video for the week “What is a phoneme?” This multimedia presentation was produced by Charles Copeland, Walden University student number A00518354 as partial completion for the course EDUC-8347: Designing Instruction for eLearning taught by Dr. Darci Harland. Multimedia Study Guide Produced by: Charles Copeland A00518354 For EDUC-8347: Designing Instruction for eLearning Dr. Darci Harland

What is a phoneme? A phoneme is the individual sound a letter produces when it is said. For instance, the letter ‘B’ usually makes the sound /b/ The letters ‘TH’ like in ‘THING’ makes the sound /T/ Phonemes are always written between two slashes / / The first question that needs to be considered is what is a phoneme? First, a phoneme is the individual sound a letter produces when it is said. The reason we need to understand phonemes is that some letters like the letter ‘c’ can produce more than one sound. For instance, the letter ‘b’ usually makes the sound /b/, the letters ‘TH’ like in thing makes the sound represented by the Greek symbol theta. You may have noticed looking at the phonemes, that phonemes are always written between two slashes.

English Alphabet & Language The English alphabet has 26 letters 21 consonants 5 vowels English has 44 sounds 24 consonant sounds 20 vowel sounds Can you see the problem? One of the problems that happens when discussing pronunciation is that the English alphabet and language do not have the same number of characters to sounds. The English alphabet has 26 letters which are broken up into 21 consonants and 5 vowels, yet the English language has 44 common sounds which can be produced, 24 consonant sounds and 20 vowel sounds. Can you see the problem? First, there are times that two consonants are used to create one sound like CH, SH, and TH. The other problem is that some consonants like C, G and Y make more than one sound. It becomes difficult when a new work is encountered the first time to guess whether the letter C sounds like /s/ like city, /k/ like cat, or /sh/ like ocean. This problem becomes even worse when it is applied to learning English as a foreign language.

The Solution The International Phonetic Alphabet was established Has 44 main symbols Each symbol represents a sound which can be made in English. Each sound written between slashes / / There is a solution to the problem. If the English alphabet is not working, work out a new alphabet. The International Phonetic Alphabet, also known as the IPA was formed. It has 44 main symbols, one for each sound. To show that the IPA is being used instead of the English alphabet, the IPA symbols are written between slash marks. You may have run across this alphabet when looking in a dictionary. Most dictionaries now include a pronunciation for each word using the IPA.

Go to the next Study Guide Week 1: Phonemes Video 2: The Consonants This concludes the first multimedia study guide created for English Pronunciation Clinic. You can download the power point and transcript for this study guide video. Please go on to the second study guide, “Video 2: The Consonants.” It will cover the different IPA symbols used to describe the vowel phonemes. (big pause) All images in the power point were found using the insert online pictures function with the creative commons image search option which is a feature of Microsoft PowerPoint 2013. Phoneme information is from Teaching pronunciation: A reference for teachers of English to speakers of other languages by Celce-Murcia et al. (1996) All images in the power point were found using the insert online pictures function with the creative commons image search option which is a feature of Microsoft PowerPoint 2013. Phoneme information from Celce-Murcia et al. (1996)