Many teachers begin English pronunciation practice as they introduce vocabulary. This is the way many textbooks advise to teach pronunciation. Unfortunately, for students with a mother tongue that bears no resemblance to English, such as Spanish, this actually makes comprehension more difficult.

Drilling pronunciation is a non-desirable form of instruction especially for children because it is difficult to use the meta-language to describe the place of articulation of new sounds with children. A common mistake found in Spanish is to say “day“ when the speaker means “they“. The Spanish “d” is not the same as the English voiced “th” as in “the”. The Spanish “d” is a voiced alveolar stop, while the English “th” sound is a voiced dental fricative. They are two different sounds. When the Spanish “d” is between two vowels, it is pronounced like the voiced th / ð / in English. For example, “enojado“ in Spanish means angry and the “ado” is pronounced ah-though because the “d“ is between “a“ and “o“, making it intervocalic.

“Heather and the Sound Cavern” is a story that fosters the acquisition of the “th“ sound in “they“, and the “d“ sound in “day” and relates the sound to the spelling throughout fantasy characters.

Through fantasy characters and stories children will remember how to produce the new target sounds and relate them to the spelling.  A step up involves combining the teaching of pronunciation with that of spelling, another important skill, that speeds up the learning of pronunciation, reading and writing. That is the main goal of Emopron stories, but the starting point is on the level of the phoneme that are non-existent in EFL learners’ mother tongue.