Academic English Skills with Dr. Byrnes

  /ʧ/ and /ʤ/ are the only affricates in English. An affricate is a phoneme which combines a plosive (or stop) with an immediately following fricative. In other words, an affricate begins like a stop , but ends like a fricative . So, to create /ʧ/, air is briefly prevented from leaving the vocal tract when the tip of the tongue presses against the back tooth ridge while the sides of the tongue press against the upper side teeth. In this way all air is blocked. Then the tongue pulls back to create friction, creating turbulence. /ʤ/ is voiced and is the counterpart to the unvoiced /ʧ/. So to say /dʒ/, additionally, voice the vocal cord. The voiceless affricate ‘ch’ is pronounced twice in the word ‘church’, and the voiced affricate ‘j’ is pronounced twice in the word ‘judge’. /ʧ/, /ʤ/ minimal pairs chain Jane char jar charred jarred Chas jazz cheer jeer cheese G’s cherry Jerry chess Jess chest jest chested jested Chester jester chew Jew chill Jill chin gin chip gyp chive jive choice J...

/h/ is quite easy to recognize for most non-native speakers. An exception might be French speakers since the letter H is always silent in French. In Britain, using or not using the /h/ sound can signify class and status (posher speakers vs ‘H’ droppers). But in American English, unless ‘H’ is silent, H is always pronounced.  Silent H words The sound /h/ is spelt with an ‘H’ or ‘WH.’ With ‘WH,’ either /w/ or /h/ is pronounced, but not both. When ‘H’ is combined with other letters like TH, SH, CH, PH, GH, and RH, they make entirely different sounds: ‘TH’ makes /θ/ or /ð/; ‘SH’ makes /ʃ/; ‘CH’ makes /tʃ/; ‘PH’ makes /f/ (except for ‘SHEPHERD’ where ‘PH’ makes /p/). ‘GH’ can be either silent or make /f/, /g/ or /p/. H is silent in ‘RH.’  These words have silent ‘H’:  what, which, where, when, why, honor, hour, honest, heir, herb, vehicle, vehement, exhausting, exhilarating  /h/, no-/h/ minimal pairs This is the minimal pairs of /h/ and non-/h/ had add hair air hall all h...

  Key to Speaking Fast in English: Weak Form Good day, everyone. Today, I want to talk about an important aspect of the TOEFL Speaking section: delivery—specifically, how to improve your speaking speed. As you may already know, one key factor for achieving a high score in TOEFL Speaking is maintaining a high WPM (words per minute)—ideally around 150 words per minute. In my experience, speaking speed often matters more than perfect pronunciation. That is, faster speakers tend to score higher than slower, overly careful ones. Why? Because the tasks require you to summarize content effectively, and to do that, you must convey as many ideas as possible—which means saying more in less time. Understanding English Rhythm To speak English faster, you need to understand how English rhythm works. Linguists categorize languages by their rhythmic patterns, which is to say what provides regularity in speech. In English, such regularity is achieved by making stressed syllables occur in the same...