What every EFL teacher should know.

An examination of the system of English consonants shows important facts in spoken language. I will address to the affricate voiceless consonant /dʒ/ in the story called

‘The Jawbreaker and the Sound Ticklers’

 English makes use of 26 consonant oppositions. Languages like Spanish only seventeen or nineteen according to the variety spoken.  Therefore, if teachers are aiming at intelligibility, there are some more consonant sounds for the EFL learner to be learned.

The thing is we cannot use meta-language to teach new sounds because it makes teaching pronunciation more difficult. Anyway, we should find a motivating way for our EFL classes to acquire the English voiced affricate found in English words with  >j<  and  >g<. Spelling helps to make relations between the sound and the letter.

Anyway, it is important to make EFL learners notice the English voiced affricate in English words with  >j<  and  >g<.  . Otherwise, a word like ‘gin’ may turn into ‘chin’, or ‘jeep’ into ‘cheap’. That happens because there are two pairs of affricates in English, whereas there is one single affricate in some languages as Spanish

Also, an allophone of /dʒ/ is found in words like ‘cónyuge’. Therefore, teachers may point to this place of articulation if they are not using the story to teach this sound. Since consonants are produced with the interference between two articulators, instructions can be used effectively pointing to the drawings used in the story. They are analogies of the organs of speech

The conflict in the story will make the articulation of this sound memorable and easy to get

Let’s read ‘The Jawbreaker and the Sound Ticklers’