Traditionally, teaching English as a second language (ESL) has been based primarily around the teaching of simple sentence structures and grammar including a lot of work in the area of tenses from Simple Present/ Past/ Future through to Progressive/Perfect and Perfect Progressive forms. Most of this learning is done whilst reading through contextual articles based around everyday things, either work or home related.
ESL: English as a Second Language
Whilst this is all beneficial, one area that is often overlooked is spoken English, correct English pronunciation; the pronunciation of words. Sounds in English can be very foreign to a new speaker. Breaking words down into their simplest sound units or phonemes can aid the pronunciation of words. This breaking down of words into their basic sound units is called phonics or phonetics. Learning how to speak English with phonics can really help English pronunciation and produce spoken English with much less of the native accent of the first language. For English this is a significant advantage as English is really the international language of commerce. In order to achieve this, it is beneficial to see the mouth, lips and tongue, forming the sounds when learning to read and speak English.
There are 70 phonemes in English and only 44 different sounds attached to them. For example, the sound “ee” as in "tree", in English can be represented by the phonics: “e”, “ee”, “ea”, “ey” and even “i”.
In the Reading Master Phonics A-Z iBook series: Phonics One, Phonics Two, Phonics Three, Phonics Four and Phonics Five cover all of the 70 phonemes (phonics) in English. Each of these iBooks incorporates video of a person pronouncing each sound as it is displayed, in order to teach spoken English. This is a great way to learn spoken English or to improve spoken English. There are two phonic reader books for each Phonic book to enable you to practice what you have learned, reading books that contain high concentrations of the 'sounds that sound the same' for each phonic.
Videos are also available as a free resource on this website in the “Phonics Video Dictionary” for all 44 sounds and their 70 spellings.
The iBooks go further by providing video inserts of a person pronouncing the sounds, together with the true to life video footage that demonstrates the word and animated text of the word, with the phoneme it illustrates highlighted. This enables full comprehension. Sign in with your email for full, free, unlimited access to the videos forthe first 5000 subscribers and visit the iBook link for the full Ipad experience.