4 Pronunciation Skills Mistakes Your Child Might be Making!
Spoken English conversation is one of the most common skills that every parent wants their child to improve. There are many ‘spoken English guru’ out there who market themselves saying they are the best. But truth be told most lack the basic understanding of English language skills. For example, ‘focus keyword’ can drastically improve your child’s spoken English conversation skills.
What if I told you to that you can see immense improvement in your child’s basic English speaking skill instantly once you start focusing on their pronunciation skills? It sounds crazy, right? I’ll dive right into the heart of the topic but first thing first. It’s important to tune your child’s mindset to LearnGrowExcel Mindset before we start teaching them. The child must feel ‘I want to improve my English speaking’.
After this shift in mindset, we must give them proper training so that the learners feel ‘I can speak English’. Once they gain enough confidence, they’ll start receiving compliments from others too. People will be impressed by the English your child will speak and compliment them saying ‘You speak English very well’. One key factor to reach this level is good command over pronunciation skills.
Why pronunciation skills are important?
A good foundation of phonetic awareness in pronunciation skills would give your child a good head-start in their journey to improve English speaking skills. A lot of the times children are often confused when it comes to pronunciation of different words in English. Their prior mistakes might create hesitation in their mind and make them feel that they don’t know the language well. In order to help our children feel confident we must teach them the rules and proper pronunciation skills in respect to English.
They must know the some of the basic rules related to English pronunciation skills which they might encounter in their day-to-day life. Therefore, an initial awareness about such common rules will give a boost to their confidence. Not only this, with time they’ll also be prepared to pronounce these words perfectly while speaking. What are some of the basic pronunciation skills in English you ask? Don’t worry, I am here to help you with proper examples and explanations.
Tell them about different types of pronunciation skills traps in English.
Read the following sentences out loud:
- I see my friend Shyam every Wednesday.
- He went to the stationery to buy some chart papers for school project.
- I look forward to reading the foreword of this book.
- Hyundai is a Korean motor vehicle manufacturer.
Let’s quickly go back to the 4 sentences I shared above. You must have noticed that some of the words are underlined in those example sentences. Kindly pay attention to those words and you’ll discover some of the most common English pronunciation skills trap hidden in the underlined words.
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Pronunciation Skills – Commonly Mispronounced Words
Teach your children about commonly mispronounced words like ‘Wednesday’. Most of the people would pronounce the word as ‘wed-nes-day’ or in other words they’ll pronounce each and every letter of the word but this is a very common mistake. We hear this wrong pronunciation so often that even a lot of adults out there have no idea that they are pronouncing it completely wrong. The correct pronunciation for the third day of the week is ‘Wenz-dei’ (and it’s the same for both UK and American English).
Example of Some Words with Silent Letters
Pronunciation Skills – Same Letters but Different Sounds
Teach your children about different sounds the same letter combinations can produce in different words. Like in this example I have underlined two words ‘chart’ and ‘school’. Both these words have the combination of letters ‘c’ and ‘h’. Now the interesting thing here is that in the first word the letters ‘ch’ produce the (tʃ) sound whereas in the second combination the same letters produce the (k) sound. This difference can confuse your child and demotivate them from speaking in English.
Related Blog on The ACE Clan:
9 Useful Ways To Improve Child’s English Speaking Skill!
Pronunciation Skills – Minor Changes in Spellings
Teach your children how adding/removing a letter from the word can completely alter the pronunciation of one word from its variation (it would also change the meaning). As underlined in the above example, the first word ‘forward’ will be pronounced with ‘short O’ and the second word ‘foreword’ will be pronounced with ‘long O’ sound (because of that extra letter ‘e’ in the word).
At the same time, your child should also know about the concept of Homophones. There are some word groups in English which have same pronunciation even though the spellings are differnt.
Knowing these rules will make your child not only confident while speaking English but also while reading the language.
Pronunciation Skills – Word Origin
Teach your children to know the origin of the word to help them understand the correct pronunciation. English is one of the few languages in the world which is still evolving. Every year, 1000’s of words are added to the list. Some of these words are also taken from different cultures across the world as these words have gained a lot of popularity or have become a renowned brand and are being actively used by a lot of people. Therefore, it’s a common occurrence in English to have such words which are spelt in a certain way but their pronunciation is completely different. To highlight this, I have used as an example a very famous car manufacturing brand from Korea. Since the origin of this word is Korean, it’s spelt as ‘Hyundai’ but pronounced as ‘hun-day’.
Some Commonly Mispronounced Brands
- Nike: ni-key
- Ikea: ih-key-yah
- Adobe: ah-doh-bee
- Porche: por-cha
- Hublot: oo-blow
- Bvlgari: bull-guh-ree
- Nutella: new-tell-ah
- Adidas: ah-dee-das
- Huawei: wah-way
- Renault: ren-oh
- Balmain: bal-mah
- Chevrolet: shev-ro-lay
- Delmonte: del-mon-tay
- TAGHeuer: tag haw-yer
- Lamborghini: lam-bor-gee-nee
Challenge: Can your child pronounce all of the above brands perfectly? Follow the following steps to receive an exciting scholarship offer for the ACE Clan Classes.
Firstly, Upload a short video of your child going through this list with perfect pronunciation on Facebook/Instagram.
Then, Tag us (@englishwithace).
Finally, We’ll send an exciting scholarship offer for your child to join our upcoming batches.
Lastly, don’t forget to follow us for more such fun challenges on Facebook & Instagram.
2 Bonus Tips
i. Here’s a list of some fun tongue twisters to practice with your child.
- Any noise annoys an oyster but a noisy noise annoys an oyster more.
- If two witches were watching two watches: which witch would watch which watch?
- If you notice this notice, you’ll notice that this notice is not worth noticing.
- I slit a sheet, a sheet I slit and on the slitted sheet I sit.
- Lesser leather never weathered wetter weather better.
- I saw a kitten eating chicken in the kitchen.
- I saw a saw that could out saw any other saw I ever saw.
- Fuzzy-wuzzy was a bear; Fuzzy-wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy-wuzzy wasn’t fuzzy, was he?
- Fred fed Ted bread and Ted fed Fred bread.
- Twelve teens twirled twelve twigs.
Related Blog on The ACE Clan:
Improve Reading Skills Through 15 Proven Strategies!
ii. List of difficult to pronounce words in English to make English pronunciation easy.
- Genre pronunciation : zhann-ruh
- Poem pronunciation : po-um
- Salmon pronunciation : sa-mun
- Yatch pronunciation : yot
- Buffet pronunciation : boo-fey
- Route pronunciation : ra-out
- Nausea pronunciation : naw-zee-aa
- Chaos pronunciation : kay-os
- Gauge pronunciation : Gai-ge
- Plagiarism pronunciation : play-j-rizm
- Entrepreneur pronunciation : on-tre-prey-nar
Final Thoughts
When it comes to pronunciation skills patience is a must. Allow your child to familiarize themselves with the rules. Give them time to naturalize the correct pronunciation as it will take time. As we often talk about it in our class and PTM sessions that knowing is only the first step in the learning journey. The more efforts you put in practicing what you’ve learnt, the better you’ll be at it. So, encourage your child to be consistent, celebrate their efforts and you’ll see the magical transformation soon.