IF YOU WERE A SAILBOAT. CONDITIONAL SONG. Vowels and diphthongs

The song If you were a sailboat composed and interpreted by the  Georgian-British singer, songwriter and musician  Katie Melua, will help us this time to sail through vowels /ɪ/  /ɪː/  /ʌ/  /ɑː/  /ɒ/  /ɔ:/  /ʊ/  /uː/, diphthongs  /aɪ/  /eɪ/  /aʊ/ and conditional sentences.

This post has been inspired by the work of the English teacher  José Álvaro Álvaro, who participated in the course  Phonetics Through Songs and the programme PhoTransEdit, used for the transcriptions in the matching activity.

 

There are two activities. Elementary and intermediate students should only do the first one, the gap-fill activity.  Upper-intermediate and advanced students can do both activities:

• A gap-fill activity designed for elementary and intermediate students. Listen to the song and fill in the gaps using the "Clue" button, where the missing word is transcribed.  

• A matching activity directed at upper-intermediate and advanced students. Once you've listened to the song and completed the gap-fill activity, try to remember the lyrics and  match the transcribed main clauses on the left with the conditional clauses on the right.

• Listen now to the official version of he same song and an alternative version with different lyrics. Can you spot the differences?
• For practice on conditional sentences, click here. 

CHASING PIRATES. DIPHTHONGS /eɪ/ /aɪ/ /əʊ/ /aʊ/

Norah Jones' swirling singing will, this time, take us into the slippery world of some diphthongs /eɪ/ /aɪ/ /əʊ/ /aʊ/ (phonemically analyzed as a sequence of a semivowel and a monophthong) with her song Chasing pirates.
WARNING: don’t confuse /əʊ/ and /aʊ/ (they are often mixed up!). Click first on the phonetic chart on the right to hear the difference.

I have to admit I chose this song because I like it, nevertheless, it does serve the purpose of showing the difference between these very diphthongs. American English is commonly described as having wide diphthongs, made with less oral tension. This is quite evident in the song where the singer (born in New York) makes little distinction between /əʊ/ /aʊ/, but she does make it.

Native-Burmese speakers find it almost impossible to pronounce diphthongs and triphthongs. The same is true of native-Caribbean speakers.

Listen to the song and fill in the gaps (using ordinary spelling, not phonetics) as you listen to it. 


For further practice with diphthongs, try this game

PAST OR PRESENT? /s/, /d/ or /t/? RUN BABY RUN

Here's a song, Run Baby Run, by Sheryl Crow to  help you identify present and past verb forms from the pronunciation of final consonants /s/,  /z/,   /d/  or  /t/.  Also to homage a good friend.

Listen to the song and fill in the gaps with the correct verb form, present or  past, according to what you hear. Click first on the clue, the infinitive of the verb written phonetically.


To practice with -ed form of regular past verbs, click here

VOWELS - SPLITTER

Hi there. Be ready to sooth your ears and read some phonetic transcription to identify the vowel sounds   /ɑː/  /æ/  /ʌ/  /e/  /ɜː/  /ɪ/  /iː/  /ɒ/  /ɔː/ /ʊ/  /uː/   through the lyrics of the song Splitter by Calexico   transcribed phonetically with the programme PhoTransEdit.

Listen to the song  and do the gap-fill exercise while listening and reading the phonetically transcribed lyrics. Click on the clue button to get a vowel phoneme  /ɑː/  /æ/  /ʌ/  /e/  /ɜː/  /ɪ/  /iː/  /ɒ/  /ɔː/ /ʊ/  /uː/ the missing word contains. Write the word in ordinary English spelling.

GLOTTAL STOP /ʔ/ AND LITTLEST THINGS

(By Rosa Maté Ibáñez and Ana López Pozo)

It's the little things that make the difference.


In this song, Littlest Things by Lilly Allen (made popular by the viral power of the net), you can learn to identify and practice glottal stop, represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ʔ/. This is produced by obstructing the airflow in the vocal tract. In certain positions  it may be used as an allophone of the phoneme / t/; This is known as glottalling or glottal replacement of 't'. See tutorial on glottal stop .
  
T Glottalisation is one of the features of Cockney English. See Cockney rhyming slang. The term Cockney has both geographical and linguistic associations. Geographically and culturally, it often refers to working class Londoners, particularly those in the East End. Linguistically, it refers to the form of English spoken by this group. It used to be looked down on by some people but today it is becoming more common and accepted. Due to the influence of  television series and some presenters, Cokney has spread. This has led to the adoption of a mock Cockney (Mockney) accent by some celebrities  looking for street credibility.

• Listen to the song and do the gap-fill exercise while listening. Click on the clue button to get a phonetic transcription of the missing words. The clues in the gap-fill exercise for this song, Littlest Things, focus on the t glottlalisation. 

• Can you find any more words containing glottal stop in the song apart from the gapped ones?

THE LOGICAL SONG FOR SYLLABIC CONSONANTS

This post is dedicated to all those Spanish State Teachers, colleagues of mine, who  are suffering the consequences of the regional governments  education cutbacks  in various Spanish Communities and to all those thousands of now unemployed teachers who have not been contracted by these regional governments in order to transfer the public money, thus saved,  to Private Education.  A tough situation for the teaching community  only sustainable thanks to the teachers' professionality and generosity. My  support  for their patience and excellence of their work in such difficult times.

• The Logical Song by Supertramp, a British rock band with major hits throughout the 1970s and 1980s,  can serve as  food for thought this time on the subject of State Education. The song was inspired by the experience of Roger Hodgson, the singer and composer of this song, who was sent to a private boarding school as a boy.

• Before listening to the song, read the quotations by Spanish poet Antonio Machado and philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno translated into English.

"Regarding culture and knowledge, you only lose what you save; you only gain what you give" Antonio Machado.

"True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant". Miguel de Unamuno.

 This is also a perfect song to practise Syllabic Consonants,  a phonetic element that normally patterns as a consonant, but may fill a vowel slot in a syllable. A weak, unstressed syllable often has a schwa /ə / in it. But if the schwa is omitted, we are left with a syllabic consonant,  a syllable where the vowel and the consonant have merged into one.

The syllabic consonants  n, l,  r, m  are phonetically represented  as  / n̩ /   / l̩/  /m̩/   /r̩ / 

Here are some examples:
button     /ˈbʌtn̩/
widen    /ˈwaɪdn̩/
able        /ˈeɪbl̩ /
bottle      /ˈbɒtl̩ /

blossom   /ˈblɒsm̩/ 

Syllabic r occurs in words like

history      /ˈhɪstr̩i/
Hungary   /ˈhʌŋɡr̩i/ 

• Listen to the song and do the gap-fill activity designed for intermediate and advanced  students. fill in the gaps using the "Clue" button, where the missing word is transcribed.

• What's the song about? Can you find a connection  between the quotations and the song. 
• Discuss the subject of Private vs State Education in your country.

THAT DAY. /S/ INITIAL POSITION

Some latin based languages tend to add an intrusive 'e' sound before the /s/ sound when it is followed by a consonant in initial position.

eg: 'e'Steve 'e'speaks 'e'Spanish.

The song That Day by Natalie Imbruglia will help in the practice of the sound /s/ in initial position as well as the practice of this sound in connected speech. Try to hear the language as chunks of speech rather than individual words. In this way you will soon be able to hear (and then hopefully produce) language as it is really spoken rather than as you think it is spoken.

• Listen to the song and fill in the gaps with the missing words, most of them are adjectives connected by commas. As you fill in the gaps remember to write the commas when needed or your answer will be seen as incorrect. If you need help click on the ? button and you will get the words transcribed phonetically.

• Further practice in phonetic transcription for advanced students. Try the following matching exercise:

These two activities have been made with the help of PhoTransEdit, a programme for transcribing ordinary English into phonetics

ENGLISH PHONETICS TRANSCRIPTION EDITOR

Here is a great page on phonetic resources where you can download PhoTransEdit , a free Windows tool created to help you typing phonetic transcriptions. The tool includes:

• Automatic phonetic transcription of English texts.
• A phonetic keyboard to edit/create phonetic transcriptions.
• Statistics on the number of times a sound is found in a transcription.
• A converter of IPA symbols into HTML code numbers.

Sample Images:

In PhoTransEdit you can also find links to other phonetic resources.