Welcome to week 4!
We have had an intense week 3 of working on our English Consonants! We celebrate your being such engaged and enthusiastic learners. Although it has been a challenging week in terms of learning various consonant features, it is inspirational to see our learners persevering and striving towards mastering their learning goals. We encourage you to keep practising!
Review of week 3
Many of you mentioned that last week on consonants has opened up a whole new world for you. Indeed, there are so many new things to learn. It is a lot of information and mastery over such linguistic concepts just requires time. This is perfectly normal. Please don’t expect or think that you should comprehend all the material straight away or by heart. The most important is that you understand the basics of the way in which the vowel diagram from Step 2.2 Introduction to week 2: vowels and the consonant grid from Step 3.1 Introduction to week 3: English consonants. Namely, how vowels and consonants are represented by symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and how the properties of vowels and consonants are indicated in the vowel diagram and consonant grid. You can then use these to understand the differences between sounds from your native language and English pronunciation, and work on the English pronunciation that you strive for.
In Step 3.2 Brainstorming about consonants and intelligibility we once again celebrated the rich diversity of our learners. It is wonderful to be able to come together in this online course from all parts of the world and be able to share our personal experiences with English pronunciation. Our experiences are unique and in sharing them so generously as our learners have, we have gathered a greater understanding of the topic.
As we delved into into matters like Consonant clusters and Tricky consonants, the results of some of the exercises revealed to us what we do and do not do in our pronunciation of English consonants. This was helpful to many of us, as we could understand how close we came to the English consonant sounds. We discovered that our way of speaking depended on where we came from and the influences of our native languages, as we touched upon Vietnamese, Spanish, Dutch, Brazilian, Indian and African languages, amongst several ways of pronouncing English consonants.
What else is happening this week?
As we proceed further, in the final week – Week 4: Suprasegmental features in English – we address suprasegmental features that apply to speech units larger than sounds. They can be used to convey meaning in addition to the meaning of words. We will discuss four suprasegmental features: stress, tempo, pitch/intonation and pausing, in Step 4.2 Introduction to week 4: suprasegmental features. You will analyze and practice suprasegmental features in exercises, like for example stress in Steps 4.5 – 4.13. You will have the opportunity to record the words in the word list and directly compare your pronunciation to audio recordings of the words in Steps 4.18 and 4.19 Assessing your English pronunciation. As a final activity, you will make a second recording of your English pronunciation reading out the word list and the reading passage again and also peer review the recording of another learner, in the same way as you did in Week 1. We hope that you will all peer-review one of your fellow participants’ recordings!
We are confident that you will see how much progress you have made during the past four weeks when comparing your first and second recording, and also how much you have developed your analytical skills in your commenting on your peer’s recording.
For those of you who have not yet completed last week’s steps, please finish them quickly so that you can start with this week’s material. We will guide you and your fellow learners through Week 4 again together so that we can all support each other. We will be initiating discussions and hope that they will be productive. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we’ll attempt to respond to common problems and questions. If you think you can help with any questions from other learners, we encourage you to reply to them in the comments. We’d be very grateful as we believe that we learn the most from one another.
Thank you so much for your support and encouragement, which we find heartening to read your comments. We hope you’ll enjoy the week and look forward to reading more from you!
Good luck and best wishes,
Laura Rupp
Amanda Whyte-Elsherif
Lyonne de Wit
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Please follow us on FutureLearn! #FLengpron
We acknowledge VUvereninging for their support.
