Category Archives: The Story of Sounds

Example words: cat, app, fab, add, taxi, sanction, accurate, vocabulary, language, catch, vanish, narrow General setting of /æ/: The lips are spread and quite open, and the jaw is lowered. The lips being open and spread may give a slight … Continue reading →

The Story of Sounds: Episode 24: Discovering the vowel /ɑː/ You can think of a vowel sound as the result of the shape of the tongue coupled with the resonant space in the mouth created by lip shape and tongue/jaw … Continue reading →

You can think of a vowel as the result of a certain position of the tongue, jaw and lips. You can also think of a vowel sound as the result of a shape (of the tongue) and a resonant space … Continue reading →

In the previous 21 episodes of the Story of Sounds we have explored 24 consonants and 8 monophthong vowels. I have tried to tell their stories from the inside, not offering the external technical descriptions you might find in a … Continue reading →

It’s a lot of fun working with the vowel /e/. Just about every language has one or more versions of this sound. In English it is one of the more frequent vowels sounds, probably in third position after /ǝ/ and … Continue reading →

The vowel sound /ɔː/ is what I call an ‘extreme vowel’ of English, because it requires two fairly extreme movements that seem to be ‘off the map’ of many of my students’ experience. This is because the lips are further … Continue reading →

While you are working with these two sounds /ǝ/ and /ɜː/ there are some other useful insights to be gained. Although these two central vowels have different symbols, they are for our practical classroom purposes formed with the tongue, lips … Continue reading →

The vowel sound /ǝ/ is as close to nothing as you can get and yet still have a sound. It is the only sound with a name, schwa, which is from Hebrew and means something like “a neutral vowel quality,” … Continue reading →

In this Episode we discover the sounds /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ using the tongue and lip buttons along with visual observation. First let’s recap: The story so far: In Episodes 15 and 16 we developed an important insight for ourselves, which once … Continue reading →