Category: vocabulary

Teaching Consonant Blends, Digraphs, and Trigraphs

Posted on | by Pearson

John_Caine
Professor John Caine
SUNY, Suffolk Community College

More than any other request, my students ask me to help them with pronunciation and vocabulary. After my first few semesters, I realized that a key factor in helping them was to start with consonant blends.

A consonant blend (also called a consonant cluster) is a group of two or three consonants in words that makes a distinct consonant sound, such as bl, br, cl, cr, dr, fl, fr, gl, gr, pl, pr, qu, sc, sk, sl, sm, sn, sp, st, sw, tr, and tw, We can group these into “l” and “r” blends, which are the most frequent and convenient to categorize.

A digraph is a single sound, or phoneme, that is represented by two letters. A trigraph is a phoneme that consists of three letters.

Consonant digraphs include ch, ck, gh, kn, mb, ng, ph, sh, th, wh, and wr. Some of these create a new sound, as in ch, sh, and th. Some, however, are just different spellings for already familiar sounds. Some consonants have “silent partners”: for example gh is a different spelling for “f” and mb is “m” while wr is still the “r” sound.

Sometimes reframing the concept in familiar terms lowers the affective filter encouraging self-scaffolding. Our goal is to encourage students to use the language they’re learning, and making the language fun to use is a great way to do that. Blends are fairly straightforward because they keep their phonemic structure. But sometimes helping students to vocalize these blends can be daunting. Teaching decoding helps them recognize and form new words.

But, there are so many blends and digraphs in English. Where to begin? Ah, the one reliable go-to connection for teaching—food. This is something familiar, something students can relate to, and something they can practice using since they come in contact with these items every day. Continue reading →

F is for Frequency

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Ken BeattyDr. Ken Beatty

Here are two key questions related to frequency: What are the most frequent words in the English language? and How frequently do we need to be exposed to new words in order to acquire them?

To answer the first question, certain words in every language appear more often than others. A common list of the most frequent 20 words in English typically includes the, be, and, of, a, in, to, have, to, it, I, that, for, you, he, with, on, do, say, and this.

Many would agree that these 20 words seem extremely common, but any comprehensive list of words tends to be drawn from a selective corpus, or body of words. The selective nature of any corpus influences what words will appear most often. For example, the Cambridge International Corpus replaces some of the above top 20 words with, uh, yeah, know, like, they, so, was, and but. Many teachers would take exception to teaching uh and yeah as among the most important words for their beginner students to learn.

The sources for corpora are often dialect-specific, for example, American English or British English, and may focus on written English or spoken English or a combination. Some corpora only collect words related to particular themes and time periods (e.g., 18th-century novels) or specific genres of speech or writing, such as medical English. Some corpora document dead or obscure forms of English, such as those drawn from Old English, Middle English, and Early English texts.

Scroll to the end of the article for teacher tasks and student tasks.

 

Continue reading →

Explore the New Pearson ELT eCatalog

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ESL16_CAT_CVR1

IMMEDIATE – INTERACTIVE – INFORMATIVE 

These three words describe the new eCatalog from Pearson ELT. This new eCatalog has everything you would expect from a catalog, and so much more! Do you want to know how to use the catalog – click here to watch the video!

What does the fully interactive catalog mean for you?
With just a click of a button, you can:

  • View hundreds of sample units from any level.
  • Listen to podcasts and audio samples.
  • Watch product and author video clips.
  • Search by key word, author, or ISBN.
  • Read articles by Pearson authors.
  • Link to easy online ordering.
  • E-mail your ELT Specialist directly.
  • Share with colleagues by e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter.

Start exploring today! 

Back to the Future: Still More Low-Tech Activities
for a High-Tech Classroom

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2013_Heyer_Sandra Sandra Heyer

This is the last article in a four-part series on activities that foster physical activity in the classroom. I titled the series “Back to the Future” because my search for activities led me back to time-tested ones I began using years, even decades ago. At first I balked at reviving them; I confess that the razzle-dazzle of the new technology had a stronger pull on me. But when I saw how enthusiastically my class responded, I had to remind myself that although the interactive activities were old hat to me, they were novel to my students, who were accustomed to a teacher-centered learning environment, one in which they rarely, if ever, got out of their seats.

I chose the activities because they might benefit our physical health, but they may have improved our psychological health as well. I think we all enjoyed periodically taking our attention off the big screen at the front of the room and instead focusing on one another. After all, that people-to-people connection, not gliding desks or a high-tech console, is what makes a class great. It’s what has always mattered—and always will.

In previous newsletters, we took a look at six activities:

  1. The Moving Line
  2. Conversation Stations
  3. Walking Dictation
  4. Find Your Match
  5. Opinion, Please
  6. Line Up According To

Below are the final two activities, Find Someone Who and The One-Question Survey. Continue reading →