PRACTICE YOUR ENGLISH

Is it hard for you to pronounce English words? Never mind, it’s very common. The pronunciation is a protracted subject in the process of learning the language. It’s difficult because the English language has 26 letters in the written alphabet, but 44 symbols in the phonetic alphabet.

However, there are free resources on the Internet for you to practise and improve your phonetic skills. We present you today the one offered by Cambridge English Online. On this website you’ll find tests, games, materials for teachers and even an application to download and record your voice.

So, what's available to you in this resource of Cambridge English Online?

The very first thing we suggest is that you do a test to examine the 44 phonemes of the English language. You have to listen to a phoneme and then choose its proper representation. After finishing the test and seeing what your level is, you can begin practising the phonemes and later on you can do the test again and see if you have improved.

The amount of activities and games that you can use to increase your phonetic knowledge is pretty big; some of the flavours that you’ll find are:

• Phonemic Chart Puzzle: it’s a funny game where you have to put into order the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle while you see the phoneme, its sound and a word that contains it.
• Which Phoneme?: a game where you have to listen to a word and then you have to choose among three different possibilities which is the proper phoneme that it’s been used.
• Phonetic Pelmanism: a classic game where you have to match the phonetic spelling with the real spelling.
• Phonemic Hangman: the game of Hangman where you have to read the phonemic spellings and try to spell the word before the stickman gets hanged.
• Shoot-a-Symbol: a game where you have to look at a word and then try to shoot the phonemes in the right order.
• Odd Phon’Out: in this game you are shown four words and you have to choose which word has a different sound to the other three.

This Web page also offers material for teachers:

• A phonemic reader that will help your students to improve their phonemic spelling.
• A poster (in pdf format) with the 44 English phonemes.
• Different flashcards with more useful material.

It is also possible to download an executable application that you can use to record your voice, listen to the saved file and in this way polish up your pronunciation.

Visit Cambridge English Online – Phonetics Focus

If you are looking for more websites to improve your phonetics you can look them up in the available online resources in this regard.