I found this as a final note
“Hints on Pronunciation for Foreigners”
from a presentation by Arthur Maerlender, PhD
Dept. of Psychiatry Child and Adolescent Section
Dartmouth Medical School
hope you have some fun….
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard, and sounds like bird,
And dead: it’s like bed, not bead -
For goodness’ sake, don’t call it “deed”!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)
A moth is not a moth in mother
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there’s dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up-and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart-
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive.
I’d mastered it when I was five.
T.S.W.
Re: learning English (Hints on Pronunciation)
I am going to print this out for my next faculty meeting and have a teacher(s) stand up and read this to the group. I hope it makes an impact on what they ask of their students when they ask them to read an unseen piece in front of the class.
Re: learning English (Hints on Pronunciation)
I am helping a colleague run a parent program for new kinder parents for 2003 (in Australia our school year starts in February). The program is to enable them to understand the strategies teachers use in the classroom so they can support this at home. I will use this poem this week as many parents put unrealistic expectations on their children’s reading development.
This poem is wonderful. One of my teachers always says that English is one of the hardest languages to learn, yet we think that if a child hasn’t mastered it by a certain age they are “at - risk”. Reading the poem made my teacher’s statement seem so true to me. With all of the words that are spelled the same and sound different and with all of the irregular spellings we have, how could we expect children to learn the language very easily. There is also more than one meaning for many of our words. I think every teacher should have this poem for their students to read.