In the first post dedicated to PHONETICS we talked about the difficulties that Spanish people find on pronouncing words that start with a S followed by a consonant.
Today I would like to point out another challenging English sound: /ʃ/
Normally, adult Spaniards, but also children not used to English sounds, pronounce it /s/.
This means that, here in Spain, you can hear the word SHIP /ʃɪp/ pronounced /sɪp/ more often than you'd expect.
So here you have an ODD ONE OUT phonetic game that will , first of all, train your students' hearing to distinguish /ʃ/ sounds from /s/ sounds.
Secondly you will let them pronounce these sounds.
If they pronounce them wrong feel free to correct their pronunciation. They won't get hurt, on the contrary, they might find it quite curious and fun, because they have to move their facial muscles in an unusual way.
I usually make the /ʃ/ sound longer than necessary and, after a while, I add the rest of the word: SHHHHHHEEP.
Here's asheet you can use in class. Of course you can think about many more words to use for extending the activity.
Have fun!
I design series of activities based on a communicative method that will help children to practice the grammar they're learning at school.
Many ESL activities, I see, are nothing more than 'fill in the blank' exercises that only teach kids how to fill in blanks and miss the whole point of learning to speak and understand a new language.
It's much easier and more fun to learn by doing, and you'll be surprised at how quickly you'll see valuable results.
You can get my activities on my online store:
