Of course, English is not your first language and you can’t expect to have perfect pronunciation. Although you might read and write English, you may not have heard much English and may be shy about speaking it. Listening to the national radio and television programmes in English is one way of brushing up your pronunciation. Another way is using the pronunciation guide in a good dictionary.
If you want your students to speak English so that they can be understood well, you must try to have the best pronunciation you can.
Use the pronunciation guide below to check how well you know the main vowel and consonant sounds or combinations of these in English. Tick the sounds that you are less confident about, and take steps to hear and speak words that contain these sounds.
short a (mat, ant)
short e (bed, end)
short i (fish, it)
short o (shop, hot)
short u (bus, under)
long a (race, late)
long e (these, scene)
long i (time, like)
long o (home, bone)
long u (tune, use)
ai (train, paint)
ea (leaf, dream)
ee (sheep, been)
oa (boat, road)
oo (look, good)
ou (ground, out)
ar (car, park)
er (her, verse)
ir (bird, shirt)
or (short, or)
ur (ture, purple)
ow (town, shower/show, low)
ay (day, play)
th – unvoiced (three, thanks)
th – voiced (this, mother)
sh (she, short)
ch (which, chicken)
ph (phone, elephant)
gh (laugh, enough, high, although)
wh (what, why)
all (all, fall)
qu (queen, quick)
y (sunny, happy)
ing (sing, talking)
OpenLearn - Letters and sounds of English Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.