Young and Messum (2012) Brita Haycraft Scholarship

www.pronsci.com 1 Brita Haycraft Spoken English Award 2012: International House Trust and IATEFL “The most successful pronunciation class I ever taught” Teaching stress and reduced forms using a fidel Roslyn Young A month ago, I worked with a group of about... More

www.pronsci.com 1 Brita Haycraft Spoken English Award 2012: International House Trust and IATEFL “The most successful pronunciation class I ever taught” Teaching stress and reduced forms using a fidel Roslyn Young A month ago, I worked with a group of about 20 French adults who all had between five and seven years of school English. They said they had difficulty understanding English speakers. I put the PronSci British English fidel on the wall. (This is a new version of Gattegno's fidel.) A fidel is a chart which groups together all the possible spellings for each sound, the different sounds being distinguished from each other using colour: all the spellings of /e/ in blue, those of /m/ in orange, etc. The vowel spellings are placed at the top of the chart in nineteen blocks of colour with the twenty-four consonant blocks underneath. The PronSci version of the fidel adds a third section for English, the schwa family, consisting of schwa itself, schwi (found in ‘happy’ and the first sy Less