Características Generales del Diseño del Proyecto

Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy,

Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Pray console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear sew it. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word,

Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it's written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak:

Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation's OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour

And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,

Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger,

Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual.

Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.

Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,

Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal,

Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor.

Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas.

Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria.

Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever,

Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary.

Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface.

Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear

Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Won't it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It's a dark abyss or tunnel:

Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight,

Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough --

Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup.

My advice is to give up!!!

OUGH

I'm taught p-l-o-u-g-h Shall be pronounced "Plow." "Zat's easy when you know," I say,

"Mon Anglais I'll get through." My teacher say zat in zat case

O-u-g-h is "oo."

And zen I laugh and say to him "Zees Anglais make me cough." He say, "Not coo, but in zat word

O-u-g-h is `off.'"

O sacre bleu! Such varied sound Of words make me hiccough. He says, "Again my friend is wrong;

O-u-g-h is `uff.'"

I say, "I try to spik your words, I can't pronounce them, though." "In time you'll learn, but now you're wrong;

O-u-g-h is `owe'!"

"I'll try no more, I shall go mad, I'll drown me in ze lough."

Story and verse are a primary way that English children absorb the linguistic lessons of their first language. Embedded in the seemingly simple rhymes are complex language patterns about intonation, rhythm, stress, and individual vowels and consonants. In this paper, the various ways that Mother Goose Rhymes can be used in the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom are explored. By pointing out these linguistic phenomena to ESL learners, they will be better able to sort out the seeming inconsistencies of what they are hearing in the real English speaking world.

Practice of P, T, K

[rule: difference between voiced and voiceless stops and aspiration of initial voiceless stops]

Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man! So I will, master, as fast as I can; Pat it, and prick it, and mark it with T, Put it in the oven for Tommy and me.

With Pat-a-Cake, the student is told to focus on pronouncing the voiceless stop series : P, T, K. The student is shown how P is pronounced fully in the front of the mouth with both lips ; T is pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching just behind the front teeth; and K is pronounced with the back of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth. For most students it is not necessary to invoke the precise terminology such as bilabial, alveolar, or velar. The student is told to focus on the voiceless pattern of the sounds P, T, K as compared to their twin voiced sounds B, D, G.

A second pattern that can be demonstrated with this rhyme is the aspiration

that occurs after the voiced stops P, T, K. Students can hold a piece of paper close to their lips while reciting the poem and watch the paper move from the aspirated air.

Linking

[ rule: If a word or syllable ends in a single consonant and is followed by a word with a vowel, the consonant is produced as if it belonged to both words]

The candlestick.

Linking is a linguistic phenomena where the end of one word starts the beginning of a second word. In this Mother Goose Rhyme, “jump over” actually sounds like “JUM” and “POVER”. This is no small issue for second language learners who may run to the dictionary trying to look up a non-existent “Pover”. Here, the linking rule is gone over so that the student understands that it occurs with words that end in other consonants. Examples include “gone over” GO NOVER; “stop it” STO PIT, and “bug off”  BU GOFF.

Tapped T

[ rule: when double “t” comes in the middle of a word, it sounds somewhat like a quickly tapped “d”]

[rule: if a word has /t/ or /d/ as a second member of a triple cluster, it can be deleted] Come, butter, come

Come, butter, come! Peter stands at the gate, Waiting for a buttered cake;

Come, butter, come.

The accent of many foreigners is partly exhibited by the hypercorrect pronunciation of certain words. Here the word “butter” sounds like “budder” and the word “waiting” sounds like “wading”. Few native speakers would pronounce the “t” sound in the middle of this word. At times it is revelatory for the ESL student to realize that they are correctly hearing the “d” sound and not the spelling convention “t”.

A second pronunciation point in this short poem is the line “Peter stands at the gate”. Here, native speakers will delete the “d” sound so that it sounds like “Stan’s”. This is is a common adjustment that native speakers use to more easily handle challenging consonant clusters such as “n-d-s”. Other common examples of this occur with the words “winter” as “winner” , “printer” as “prinner” and “ Atlanta” as “Adlana”.

[ rule: differentiate between voiced and voiceless TH]

[ rule: function words are unstressed, unless at the end of a sentence] One misty, moisty morning,

When cloudy was the weather, There I met an old man

Clothed all in leather; Clothed all in leather, With cap under his chin— How do you do, and how do you do,

And how do you do again?

Have students count the voiced and voiceless occurrences of TH. There are six voiced TH sounds and one voiceless TH sound.

A second point in this short rhyme is the difference between the two “do’s” in “how do you do” . The stress falls on the second “do” not the first. Have students recite the rhyme reversing the stress to see if it sounds funny to them. Point out that the vowel in the first “do” is reduced to schwa @ sounds like “duh”. Here

the first “do” is an unstressed auxiliary while the second “do” is stressed because it falls at the end of a sentence. This is a basic rule in English: Content Words that have a meaning in and of themselves are stressed (dog, run, December) ; Function Words with mostly grammatical meanings are unstressed (for, a, who).

Double Consonants

[ rule: If two identical consonants are next to each other, the single consonant is elongated and not just produced twice]

Star bright, starlight, First star I’ve seen tonight.

Wish I may, wish I might, Have the wish I wish tonight.

the final consonant is the same as the beginning consonant of the next word. For example: “bad dog” is “baddog” or “ less serious” is “lesserious”.

Intonation in a Series [rule: the first two items of a series rise and the last falls] [rule: Wh-questions fall ; Yes-No questions rise at the end]

Bow, wow, wow! Whose dog art thou? Little Tom Tinker’s dog.

Bow, wow, wow!

This rhyme exhibits two patterns. First, the fun-to-say series “bow, wow, wow” has a rise on the first two items and a fall on the last “wow”. Second, the question, “ Whose dog art thou? follows the falling pattern of Wh-questions. Only Yes-No questions rise at the end. So the falling pattern of the final “wow” parallels the falling pattern after “thou.”

Intonation

Hush-a-bye, baby, on the treetop, When the wind blows, the cradle will rock; When the bough bends, the cradle will fall. Down will come baby, bough, cradle, and all.

ESL classes are sometimes pleasantly startled to hear this rhyme sung, as if to a baby. It’s important to really get into it and demonstrate the uninhibited sound patterns. The

lengthening on “baby” , “blows” “bends” contrasts nicely with the relative shortness of “treetop”, “rock”, and “fall”. The intonation falls at the end of the sentences which fits with the meaning of the words. In the final line “baby” is again long while “bough,

cradle, and all” is crushed together and reduced to “bowcrdlnall” so that it is virtually the same length as the endings of the previous three stanzas.