English Practice & Support

Theory:

Our look at the BASIC CONCEPTS has shown the following:

Vowels can have long and short sounds.

The long sounds are associated with their names.

Vowels can be neutral, and sound like U, and these are called SCHWA.

Vowels can be silent, and sometimes a silent vowel can affect the sound of another vowel, as with the silent E in TAPE.

The letter R can affect the sound of a vowel, causing it to have a different sound; two LL's can have the same effect.

Sometimes a vowel has a unique sound and sometimes it is a mixture of two sounds.

For these reasons the five vowels A,E,I,O, and U can generate the 20 unique vowel sounds that are used in English.

You cannot assume that a vowel will have its own sound because sometimes vowels take on the sound of other vowels, as in the word SOME, where the O sounds like a U.

Consonants are quite straightforward, but there are a few unusual things about them.

We saw that words are made of syllables, and each syllable only has one vowel sound.

These syllabes can either be stressed or unstressed, and a word only has one stressed syllable, though there are cases when a secondary stressed syllable is needed, because words can't start with two unstressed syllables.

The vowel sound for an unstressed syllable is usually the neutral SCHWA sound.