Gracia Castillo's Blog

 CONNECTED SPEECH Listening exercises make me go crazy! I don't understand! They speak fast! There are words I don't get! I know the struggle😁: Been there, felt that way! Yes, English speakers' accent vary. Yes, they do speak fast. Yes, if your vocabulary is short, you will have a hard time trying to understand. But there is a set of pronunciation rules you should manage to feel less stressed when listening to any kind of input. In this post we will go over CONNECTED SPEECH and its main features. There are about six of them but we will cover just the basic ones. When we speak, we do not say the words I N D I V I D U A L L Y or S E P A R A T E L Y; we say them continuously. There is a difference between the way we pronounce the words in isolation and the way we pronounce them in full sentences. In connected speech words are clipped and words are stressed differently than they would be in writing. Linking: When a word finishes in consonant sound and the next word begins wit...

I nternational P honetic A lphabet and Phonetic Transcriptions When you start learning English as a Second or Foreign Language and realize words are not pronounced as they are spelled, you may go crazy😜! I never get tired of watching the following clip and play it for my students whenever I can, we definitely relate to Ricky Ricardo at some point of our teaching-learning process😂! How many times have you mispronounced words which you considered knowing the way they were pronounced? I will never forget the first time that happened to me; I was in an EFL class with my cousin and there was a dialogue which had the word "priest". I read it as /praɪst/, my cousin looked at me and said, "It's /prɪest/." When we asked our teacher he said both of us were wrong and told us it was /pri:st/. Both of us got embarrassed (I was a teen then!) and I promised myself to study "the way words were pronounced in English". Said and done, I found out about IPA and that hel...