English Spelling

Technique Builder Exercises Plus, book six in the series, is made up of a technique builder and bonus material. The technique builder is comprised of two contrasting parts: a slow and a fast approach. Part one reviews earlier material, taking a slower approach to basic intonation, and the pronunciation of glides and shortened blocks. Part two of the technique builder also reviews earlier material, but takes a faster approach, revisiting both pronunciation and intonation, with a focus on allowing technique to become fully integrated into the body.

When kids aren’t excited about learning, it’s not a reflection of their abilities. It means they need to be engaged...and what engages kids? Food! By practicing the pronunciation and spelling of the most popular dishes in the world, your child will become more fluent in English and develop a skill for picking up new vocabulary. By following the pronunciation of an expert narrator, they will gain the confidence to talk about some of their favorite foods.

Understanding and Drilling Longer Words, book four in the series, focuses on the principles that must be understood in order to comfortably comprehend or speak longer words. These principles include breaking larger words into smaller groups of letters, or letter pairs, and being able to use breath control to comfortably say those letter groups. We'll extensively drill repeated letter pairs in order to be able to say longer strings of letters on a single breath. We'll also look at the precise ways certain letters can be greatly shortened and still efficiently understood.

We will now move from the drills back into more lecture material. We'll introduce new topics, such as intonation, and examine the different tones used for questions and for answers. We'll also go into more detail on topics already introduced, such as glides. Since our goal is both to easily understand other speakers and to speak with clarity and naturalness ourselves, a detailed look at glides, linking, and clean connections is worthwhile. We'll also compare different types of letter pairs to strengthen our ability to hear and say all letter combinations.

Forget the Technique; Just Speak - The Final Drills from Slow to Sprint focuses purely on drilling. The drill starts with single letters and expands gradually into very long words. The exact same set of letters and words is repeated three times at increasing speeds - slow, very fast, and sprint. In moving to the next level and fully incorporating this technique into our speaking, we want to, in a sense, “forget the technique” and just speak freely. If you run into trouble in any areas with any particular sounds, you can always go back to the technique.

Advanced Concepts and In-Depth Review, book five in the series, explores some more advanced concepts, as we'll look at the idea of "thinking the letter" and letting go of technique. We'll do some speed drills to continue to build up the number of letters that can be said in a single breath. In addition to name drills, there is a troubleshooting section, in which we'll explore how to get help from a speaker in the event we can't understand what they're saying or spelling. This book ends with several chapters of drills.

Are you worried about your English skills? Do you want to sound like a native speaker each time you open your mouth? Overcoming your accent, mastering the vocabulary, the grammar and the pronunciation can be challenging, depending on your native tongue.