Classroom Activities Part V: Vowel Sounds

The most difficult part of learning any language, truly, is figuring out not only what it sounds like, but also how to repeat those sounds, just not a few times, but over and over again with consistency and closely enough to the standard pronunciation that people will understand what the heck you’re trying to say. Most of my time teaching in Madagascar has been spent teaching listening and speaking skills. If you have journeyed with me for a while, you know that I rarely teach grammar and only teach writing and reading skills to advanced students, which is even more infrequent. The grammatical points I teach are more so to teach points about how we pronounce words and sounds in English. I’m often patient with this part of teaching a language because, as a language learner myself, I struggle with reproducing sounds. Anyone who compliments my French accent and pronunciation doesn’t really realize how many years and hours went in to making sure I could sound like a French person consistently, and even then I don’t always get it right. Half my battle with learning Malagasy is that I can’t reproduce some of the sounds which are difficult but also common. It’s just the way it is.

Most American language learners know that the “th” sound in English is a nightmare for English-learners. This is because the sound is generally unique to the English language other than a few Germanic languages, but even then, those languages have their own twist on the sound in general. Likewise, when English-learners try to produce the “th” sound, which is awkward because it involves a surprisingly dexterous tongue and a sufficient amount of throat vibration, it usually comes out as either “d’, “z”, or “f”. That being said, I don’t spend too much time on “th” as it’s a fairly common sound in English, so I let my students try to pick it up on their own as I speak, just I learned the difference between “soi, soit, sois, and soient” while learning French (there is no real difference).

As a side note, my name, “Nathaniel,” is the worst name to have for English-learners. Not only is there a flipping “th” in the middle of the word, there’s also that nasty “ie” vowel combination that doesn’t have many similarities with any other sounds. Most English-learners pronounce my name “Na-fan­-eye-el”, which adds a whole other syllable that isn’t there. I let my Malagasy teacher struggle with it by refusing to let him call me “Nate” because he likes to tease me for not being able to say Malagasy words like mahafantatra, mieritreritra, or fanononana. We have a good relationship.

Anyways, something that blows a lot of English-learners’ minds is the fact that all the English vowels, all 5 and ½ of them (a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y), have short and long sounds. And depending on the surrounding letters, a vowel may, or may not, follow a pronunciation pattern. Now you may have forgotten the difference between a short and long vowel sound. It’s not that hard. A long vowel sound is pronounced the same way we say the letter. So for “I” we pronounce it “eye”. The rest follow suit, and the short sound is whatever sound the vowel makes that isn’t the long sound. Here’s the chart I drew for my students below (I added the accents myself to help them visualize which sound the vowel makes):

​Vowel	Short	Long
Aa	Bàt	Räin
Ee	Bèd	Fëet
Ii	Sìt	Kïte
Oo	Hòt	Böat
Uu	Cùp	Valüe
(Yy)	Vowel: Why, Shy, By	Consonant: Yet, Yearn

Now mind you, this is nice and all, but how the heck are we supposed to know which sound a vowel makes given the word? Well, luckily for us, there are some rules you probably learned in grammar school but have long forgotten, not that they’re really useful anyways. I gave my students three to help them out at least a little bit and to clear some of the insanity of English pronunciation.

First: if the word is one syllable, has one vowel, and ends with a consonant, then it makes a short sound. E.g., Stuff.

Second: If there are two vowels next to each other, the first does the talking (makes a long sound), and the second does the walking (remains silent). E.g., Rain. (This rule is absolute garbage, but it’s a good base for language learners.)

Third: The silent “e” rule (which is by far the only consistent and most useful) which makes the vowel preceding it and only separated by one consonant a long sound. That’s why we say “plàn” with a short sound but “pläne” with a long sound.

At this point I would write a whole list of words (probably 30 in total) on the board that students would have to sort through and figure out whether it was a short or long sound. More importantly, once they were done doing this in pairs, we would go through them together as a class, and they would have to try to pronounce the word correctly without me saying it first. All the words were short, and there was not shortage of words where all I did was add an extra “e” to make the vowel long, such as “bit” to “bite”. I also included words that sound the same but look different like “rode” and “road” as well as “mane, main, and Maine.”

I unfortunately had to cut my students off at the knees after they successfully and so well completed our exercise by informing them that these “rules” I gave them don’t really work all the time, like that bull-crap way of saying “add -ed to the end of the word to make it a simple past tense verb” which is absolutely ludicrous once you realize how many irregulars the English language has and how all those “regular verbs” are the least used words ever. We have German to thank for all the irregulars. I did this by having “America” and “Madagascar” as the last words. I pronounced each of them with long vowel sounds (which you should try if you want to make yourself laugh) as a way of demonstrating that sometimes words just don’t sound the way they’re spelt, nor do they follow the “rules” that we linguists have fabricated. The main problem is with diphthongs, which are vowel combinations, that make all sorts of different sounds. Like how the “ou” in “hour” and “your” are completely different. Or how we can say “bow” two different ways and each way has two different meanings.

Bow – the front of a ship

Bow – to show a sign of respect by inclining the body or head

Bow – as in a bow and arrow

Bow – as in the thing you use to tie a Christmas present

Absolutely whack

To better put the idea of words looking crazy with different ways to pronounce them into some real-world scenarios, I wrote on the board some places in New England for them to try to pronounce:

York

Kittery

Kennebunk

Skowhegan

Piscataqua

Worcester

Leominster

Passaconaway

Micmac

Penobscot

Maliseet

Passamaquoddy

Calais

Vassalboro

Androscoggin

Oh man did it crack me up watching them try to pronounce these names. And once I told them how to pronounce them correctly, there were serious threats of uprisings in my classes. But honestly, Madagascar celebrated the 50th anniversary of the largest university student demonstration not too long ago, so it’s a tradition you could call it. In fact, the faculty at the university went on strike for a month in April. And then students went on strike. How’s that for cross-cultural differences?

Anyways, that was my lesson on pronouncing vowel sounds. I’m sure you either learned something new or relearned something you have long forgotten or maybe just always knew internally but never knew consciously, like how there is an order of adjectives we all follow but don’t know why. The old great green dragon sounds correct, but the green old great dragon is just wrong. You know it. I know it. But neither of us know why, and that’s just fascinating.

As always, know that you are in my prayers each morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.