Brief Introduction of Talking Street

Brief Introduction of Talking Street

 

Talking Street English, founded by Ningbo Wisdom Foreign Languages School, is an advanced training institute which mainly caters to the people at work.. Talking Street advocates that to learn English freely under a relaxing and satisfying surrounding which enables the students to enjoy the pleasure of success the scientific and personal courses bring to them. Talking Street English is dedicated to become the best English education institute for people at work in China. Applying “Multi-English Education” mingled with advanced multi-media technology, tutoring students by foreign teachers in private classes and offering students pure English environment bring about brand new modern English education concept, which completely changes the traditional English education mode whose disadvantage is “to be able to pass exams but not to use English, be able to write but not to speak”. The school is located in Old Waitan at the mouth of San River - the new busy street area with the culture of one hundred and elite art of modern architecture. The school owns the education space of 1000 square metres and has delicate, satisfying education environment. And the school also possesses a media room, a lab, private classrooms, salon classrooms, the room for speaking corner and other education rooms and facility. The school is really an ideal place with a pure learning environment, abundant teaching mediums, unique teaching characteristics and absolute as well as effective teaching result. The school employs full-time foreign English experts who are from USA, Britain and Canada and have rich experience in English teaching and TESL qualification and provide complete quality assurance by offering rich and diversified English salon, after-school activities and pure English friend-making community. The students can easily grasp authentic English during their study: To communicate with the foreign teachers, to study in the real language environment. And they can improve their commercial ability have a good language sense during their study.

We have world-famous teaching method, Experienced foreign teachers, comfortable study environment, the specialized service procedure.  We believe that we can unquestionably be progressive and develop together with you

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The Source : talkingstreet.coachdevelop.com

VOWELS, CONSONANTS AND SYLLABLES IN ENGLISH

VOWELS, CONSONANTS AND SYLLABLES IN ENGLISH:

English Teaching Perspective

David S Taylor
School of Education
University of Leeds
source: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/

Abstract

The terms vowel, consonant, and syllable are crucial in all discussions of English pronunciation. Despite this, the meaning of these terms is often not clear. In particular, it is frequently unclear whether they are being used in a phonetic or a phonological sense. Both phonetically and phonologically there are problems of definition. This paper explores the meaning of these terms, and points out that, as teachers of English, we can only make sense of the phenomena to which these terms refer if we take into account both the phonetic and the phonological aspects, while at the same time carefully distinguishing between them.
    Discussions of English pronunciation, particularly from a teaching and learning point of view, often suffer from a failure to distinguish sufficiently between phonetics and phonology and to consider the relation between the two. For example, the well-known vowel and consonant charts reproduced in most treatments of English pronunciation often do not make it clear whether the sounds referred to are phonetic or phonological entities. In the British and European tradition there has perhaps been a tendency to adopt a too phonetically-oriented approach, while the American tradition has perhaps paid too much attention to phonology (see Taylor 1994). Yet it is obvious that most phenomena we come across in dealing with English pronunciation can only be properly understood with reference to both phonetics and phonology. Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of vowels, consonants and syllables. It is the intention in this paper to explore these problematic terms and what they refer to from the point of view of what English teachers need to know about them.

The terms vowel and consonant are fairly familiar, and probably anyone who can read and write has come across them. This very familiarity is in itself a problem, however, because we all tend to assume that we know what vowels and consonants are. But when we come to consider the matter more closely we quickly realize that this is far from being the case. This can easily be shown by asking an English speaker, How many vowels there are in English? By far the commonest response to this question is 'five'. A moment's reflection, however, will show that the matter is by no means as straightforward as this. It is clear that the answer 'five' refers to the vowel letters of the Roman alphabet used to write English. It is equally clear that there are more than five vowel sounds in English.

Here then is a first difficulty. In common use and understanding the terms vowel and consonant tend to refer to the letters of the alphabet, in other words to writing. The letters do of course represent sounds, but not in any straightforward way, as can be seen from the fact that we have only five vowel letters to represent about twenty English vowel sounds. In talking about vowels and consonants, therefore, we must first be careful to distinguish clearly between sounds and letters, and between speaking and writing

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