![]() For example, if students have problems pronouncing “strength”, it’s best to practise it as: The easiest way for students to do so is to start with the vowel sound and then slowly build on it by adding sounds before and/ or after. The vowel sound which defines a syllable is also the key to pronouncing consonant clusters. These can be done in either order, but I’d probably work on them saying the consonant clusters first. Once students can intellectually understand that “streets” is just one syllable, the next two steps are getting them to recognise that without too much thinking time and getting them to pronounce it themselves. There is another whole article on teaching English syllables on this site. For example, “cried” only has the vowel sound “ai”, and so is a one-syllable word. In English, one syllable basically means one vowel sound, with long vowel sounds like “or” and diphthongs like “ai” and “O” also counting as one vowel sound and so one syllable. This means that the first thing that most students need to know in order to recognise and then pronounce consonant clusters is a definition of a syllable. There are also many students who have never studied the concept of syllables even in their own language. One of the problems Japanese students have with recognising that “strike” is one syllable in English is that Japanese doesn’t have the same concept of what a syllable is, and the same is true for other languages. What students need to know about consonant clusters Although native speakers also do this to some extent, there is usually at least a little residual part of or effect of the sound, so that a native speaker’s pronunciation of “kids” doesn’t quite sound like “kiz”, and “eighths” is slightly different from “ace”. As with this example, swallowing sounds seems to be most common with final consonant clusters. For example, when my Thai students tried to say “Macdonald’s”, it took me ages to understand what they were saying, and when I finally did it still sounded more like “Macdonal” to me. The opposite problem is swallowing sounds. ![]() To make that even trickier, English also has consonant clusters where vowels are written in between the consonants but are not pronounced, as can be seen in past verbs like “passed”. Perhaps more surprisingly, some of those Japanese speakers have problems recognising that they are only hearing one syllable when an English speaker says “strike”, and this is true for many other nationalities too. This is understandable because in Japanese all consonants except a final “-n” have an accompanying vowel and so no initial consonant clusters are possible. For example, the Japanese use the English word “strike” in their own language, but in Japanese it has four syllables and so can be pronounced something like “sutoraiku”. However, the most common problem worldwide is probably adding extra vowels between the consonants. Some nationalities have more general problems with English pronunciation that also manifest in consonant clusters in English such as adding another vowel before “s” (“I’m from Espain”, etc) and not being able to pronounce the component parts of the consonant cluster (pronouncing “three” as “tree” or “sree”, etc). Typical student problems with consonant clusters This article gives tips on how to present and practise this point until students can at least hear such groups of consonants clearly and pronounce them understandably, including some fun consonant cluster games. However, for my students both the trickiest pronunciation point and the one that is most likely to lead to communication problems is consonant clusters like the “str” and “ngs” in “strings”. When it comes to tricky pronunciation points in English, perhaps the most practice is available for difficult sounds like the two pronunciations of “th” and close minimal pairs like “hat” and “hut”.
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