I’m teaching a few students who have pronunciation problems. Most of their phonemes are fine, or at least understandable, but one phoneme in particular, the ‘S’ sound before certain vowels, is unclear enough that I can see it causing major understanding issues or at least embarrassment
These students, one Taiwanese, one Japanese, have trouble with:
S before /I/ and S before /iː/ and /i/
basically instead of a clear S sound, they produce something between /S/ and /ʃ/, so sip becomes ship, seat becomes sheet, and sit becomes shit. You can see how this could be a problem.
I’m trying to go over this with them, but it’s incredibly hard to describe how to produce the s sound.
I just wanted to see if anyone has corrected this issue successfully and how you did it.
Have them concentrate on keeping the tip of the tongue more forward in the mouth.
The difference between /s/ and /sh/ is where the tongue is positioned in the mouth. There are actually two “camps” of /s/ pronunciation in English – those who put the tip of the tongue upward and have it nearly contact the palate just behind the alveolar ridge (that bump behind your top teeth), and those who drop it downward so it contacts the gums underneath the front bottom teeth. It will be easier to describe and correct using the upward variant. /sh/ is farther back. It is farther back in the mouth than the Pinyin x sound in Mandarin (and there’s not as much ‘smiling’ going on in terms of mouth position). For /sh/ the tongue tip should be behind the alveolar ridge, just where the roof of the mouth starts going upward.
Google “sagittal section” (a cross-section of the head) to get good diagrams of what the inside of the mouth looks like in terms of tongue and articulator positions, if you’re dealing with adults. Kids, maybe not so much.
You may also like to have them practice two syllables to ease into the /sl/ sound. Suh-lip. Have them feel how the tongue draws backward along the roof of the mouth as they move from one to the other, then gradually increase the speed of that motion until it coalesces into one syllable.
I have a pronunciation book which has great exercises and even a cross section of the mouth, but it’s still hard to discern at times how physically a sound is made. I can feel how i do it, but explaining it to the student is the hard part.
When I was younger I had a problem with the s sound and the school used to use this line, which I promptly memorized
Sammy the snake slithered silently across the sand … you could use this or an adaptation and do the movements to get the kids into it (if they are younger that is) with emphasis on the ssss sound.
The students are actually adults. I think younger students would actually be easier to teach pronunciation with. Years of speaking Chinese or Japanese changes their perception of phonemes and making some english phonemes that arent present in their native tongue is a completely novel experience to them.
I like that sentence, but the problem is not exercises or drills(I can come up with a ton of those on the fly) it’s that they physically have a lot of trouble making these sounds. Ironlady has actually answered my question perfectly.
Yeah, the problem is that if you can’t tell them the mechanics of making the sound (in cases where they simply haven’t been able to imitate it or any approximation of it), all the practice in the world won’t do the trick. It reminds me of my “correct pronunciation” class with a Famous Radio Broadcaster, where her “method” was simply to repeat the offending word over and over, louder each time, into the ear of an individual who was having problems with it, in front of the whole class, until she finally gave up. She was trying to get Taiwanese students to distinguish between Pinyin “x” and “sh”. Good luck with that one…
It helps my kids at times when I draw a simple cross section of the mouth with lips, teeth, the top and bottom of the mouth, and the tongue, on the whiteboard.
I never need it for “s” though. I’m of the latter of Ironlady’s schools “tongue flat, bottom of mouth, blow air over the tongue”
I find that completely bizarre. Mandarin has exactly the same phoneme. There are at least (off the top of my head) 2000 words pronounced ‘si’. Although … come to think of it, the tai-ke pronunciation of many of them is ‘shi’. Would it be worth getting a ‘cut-glass accent’ fellow (Taiwanese) teacher to demonstrate and explain the pronunciation difference? Anyway, the tongue-position method is a very good one - works for me (in the reverse scenario, obviously).
Mandarin has this sound, but it does not occur in the same environment as the /s/ phoneme in English. That’s why Taiwanese learners have a problem with it in English. There are limitations on which vowels can occur after it in Mandarin (you could never have the long “i” like in English “see” – that will always be “she” in Mandarin sounds). So though the same sound exists, it’s not natural for Chinese speakers to put certain other sounds together with it. They’re fighting the ingrained urge to replace it with the Pinyin “x” which is what would be correct in Chinese.
You’re mistaking pinyin for english. there are a lot of chinese characters with the pinyin of “si”-- like 死，四，思, but that sound is different from the english 'si" which is in sing, sit, silly.
ironlady is right in that the /s/ consonant exists but only certain vowels are allowed to happen after it in chinese(or japanese, or korean)
The english ‘si’ combination, or /sI/ in IPA, does not exist in mandarin Chinese.
For most phonetics, I’ve had relative success with getting the students to try sentences with the offending phonemes in it.
For /s/, I’d conjure up something like: “Sam Sossaman shocked his classmates with his fancy street smarts and boyish charms.” I reward the first student who pronounces the entire sentence correctly with candy or school-sanctioned play-money, but buzz out (formerly using the Taboo! buzzer, but since substituting it for scat noises) students in rotation exactly when they miss. It’s the only training of this sort that my students liked.
I devised it after reading a few articles showing that Japanese people could be retrained to distinguish and then properly pronounce /l/ and /r/ after a few exercises of listening and mimicry. (It turns out that the Wikipedians have summarized it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_s … f_training)
