4. How to Teach Articulation: Sound Features and Similarities

Teaching children how to articulate the sounds that make up the English language is a multisensory activity. Children must bring their ears, eyes, voices, tongues, and mouths to the occasion. Often they find this work fun and engaging. 

Every sound has features that differentiate it from other sounds. You’ll want to point out these features explicitly to help students hear and feel the differences. 

Each time you introduce a sound, talk through these questions with your students:

• What is your mouth doing when you make the sound? What is your tongue doing?
• Is the airflow coming from your mouth continuously or does it stop quickly?
• Is your voice box vibrating? Or is air coming through with no vibration? Touch your throat to feel if there’s a vibration. 

Click on the interactive below to hear the /b/ sound and learn about its features.

Accurate Sound Pronunciation: Teaching /b/, Not /bŭ/

It is a common habit for people to add a short 'u' sound to the end of consonant sounds. For example, they might sound out tab as /tŭ/, /ă/, /bŭ/, rather than correctly as /t/, /ă/, /b/. Adding /ŭ/ is called "vowelizing" the sound. When we do this, we distort the sound and make blending sounds more difficult. To prevent or correct this habit, teach students to clip the sounds.

In this short video, reading specialist Morgan Walton demonstrates a simple tip for helping students remember to clip the sounds.

Teaching Sounds in Groups

Speech-language pathologists have found ways to categorize sounds by their features. When students learn these sounds in a group, they may be better able to remember how to make them. 

Here are groups commonly used by speech-language experts (though terms may vary). Click through each to learn more: 

• Consonant Pairs
• Nasal sounds
• Tongue lifters
• Glide sound ‘y’
• Moving consonants
• Vowels, diphthongs, and vowel-r