Recommended reading

This book is an excellent source of both descriptive and practice material for (American) pronunciation. You can find it in the Biblioteca de Lengua Inglesa:

• F Leng Inglesa G/CELTEA.

21 accents

21 accents by a professional actress. Many actors/actresses are trained on a variety of accents, and this training involves things we discuss in this class. We'll work with it in class.

Phonetic fonts (PC/Windows users)

If you have trouble using phonetic fonts, check out Luis Luque's email on the course webpage. Many of you send me assignments in Word format, which is fine. To make your document completely compatible, you can save it as a .pdf file.

In Word, go to Archivo > Imprimir and click on the PDF button. That I will read alright.

Unit 1: The PowerPoint presentation

Unit 1 Fonética contrastiva

View more presentations from dbarrerapardo.

Speech perception

A very interesting scientific field, related somewhat to the topics of Unit 1, is speech perception. Many dog owners firmly believe that their pets understand (a very basic version of) human language. What do you think? Click on the image and it'll zoom in.

Who are The Who?

I was surprised that the other day, in the course of one of my many classes, I mentioned the rock group The Who and nobody knew who the heck I was talking about. If you watch CSI: MIAMI or CSI: Las Vegas the theme song in both is a song by this group.

As an English instructor, I feel you have to check this video out:

Plans for next week

Oct 26, 27, and 30 there will be a special pronunciation session instead of regular class. This is part of work for a doctoral program, so your regular attendance will be greatly appreciated. If this is not enough, I am ready to bribe you with extra credit for attending these three sessions. A promise is a promise.

A fish called Wanda

One of the most hilarious scenes I've seen in the movies is from the (now) classic A fish called Wanda. The joke is phonetic in nature, because the words Wanda and wonder sound very similar in standard British English (Americans did also get the joke, though).

Wanda's lover is in court (acting as a lawyer) and when his cunning girlfriend testifies in a way that surprises him, he yells: WANDA! Of course no one in the room knows they are together, so he immediately tries to correct himself and says: I wonder, I wonder if ... but by then his whole act is ruined.

Well, I ALSO wonder about some students in this course who are not doing the assignments, because that will be between 20—30% of the final grade. I wonder what their plans are for this subject.

Could anyone illustrate me?

Could be fun

This video shows an Italian guy instructing on how to get rid of your accent. As you will see, he does not achieve his goal (whatever that goal is!). To watch the video go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjHT8o7Z2wA

Problems with the phonetic fonts?

Luis Luque García-Lomas comments that the phonetic fonts don't seem to work on his computer. I wonder if perhaps he is using Windows Vista. As you can tell from class, I installed them OK and seemed to work fine.

To refresh some of the knowledge of phonetics from the first and second years, please check regularly Prof. John C. Well's blog:

http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/

As I will show in class today, on the classroom's PC, to read some of the material I will make available you need to install a set of phonetic fonts. For windows, do the following:

1) just click here Font Download Charis SIL 4.106 (official release)

2) next click on Charis SIL 4.106 font release - SIL PUA 5.1a (Windows, Macintosh and Linux)

3) finally place the Charis fonts in the folder for fonts that you will find in "Paneles de control"

If you use, like me, a Mac, let me know and I will give you some new instructions.