Sunday, January 24, 2010

Teaching Phonics- by Ruby

Hi, there:

When it comes to teaching Phonics (the relationships between writing system (alphabet) and pronunciation) to L2 adult learners, I have an idea. Long time ago in Taiwan, when my kids were babies, I bought several Phonics toys (with a keyboard and many Sesame Street characters) for them to practice English pronunciation. I found it very useful and very effective. Whenever they pushed one alphabet button, the machine would say the pronunciation of the alphabet as well as give an example starting with that sound. (There are many other functions and even all kinds of tests.)

Several years later when I was studying in the Dept. of English Literature & Language in National Kaohsiung Normal University (the 2nd best university especially for training high school teachers in Taiwan), I saw my UK SLA professor bring that kind of machine to class to show us how to do phonics. I consider that tool (available in Toyrus and Walmart) very convenient and useful, even to adult learners, just for your reference.

1 comment:

  1. I also think it is very important to teach possible consonant clusters in English like tr- as in 'try', str- as in 'street', pr- as in 'pray', spr- as in 'spring', sk- as in 'sky', skr- as in 'script', etc. Of course, consonant clusters do not only appear in word initial position. There are also possible consonant clusters that usually show up at word final position such as -ps as in 'lips', -ks as in 'fix', -pt as in 'script', etc.

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