InTuition Languages Blog

The popularity of technology is changing the way we speak. In a backlash against the growing use of alienating jargon, people have been coming up with their own interpretations of the social marketing revolution. 1. Plugthug: someone who’d kill for access to recharging facilities 2. ‘Nice to have intermet you’ 3. Spamnesia: failing to reply [...]

I have been working in England since April but haven’t had much opportunity to speak English. Living with a family is very different from renting an apartment. I am enjoying the quiet, relaxing atmosphere in this town. It is comfortable. Y

Using Tongue Twisters can be a fun way to break up a class in between activities. We have some practise sentences for you. Enjoy! Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, Where’s the peck of pickled peppers [...]

Pronunciation does not have to be a separate activity in class. You can direct your student’s attention to pronunciation in a variety of ways: Listen to recordings from text books / podcasts / computer downloads, etc. Then you can: Choose a short passage and ask your student questions about the pronunciation and the accents Do [...]

Many learners of English are keen to ‘lighten’, or even lose their L2 accents. They have various reasons, which perhaps include an aim of appearing  more fluent in the language or being less conspicuous in the wider society. Or maybe their goal of minimizing an L2 accent is linked to a perception of attaining and [...]

In written English, a stretch of speech appears on the page as words. When it is spoken, it is heard by the ear as dividing up into tone units, or chunks, which we can think of as being the basic building blocks of the spoken language. The sounds that make up a tone unit, or [...]

One way of giving pronunciation lessons is to start with the sounds of single words. While this is useful up to a point, in order to communicate we speak in phrases and sentences. Now, the sounds that we have targeted by using single words, will change, depending on the sounds that proceed and follow them [...]

Individual words have a pattern of strong (stressed) syllables and weak (unstressed) syllables. In sentences we find a similar pattern of strong (stressed) and weak (unstressed) words. Short sentences tend to have typical stress patterns: oooO What would you like? oOo A coffee please. oO Coming up! oOoo How much is it? ooO Two pounds [...]

Exercise in Word Stress If the word has more than one syllable, we give stress to one of the syllables. There are lots of examples of how to point out what syllable is given stress. Hereare a few. They might look silly, but they are effective: We do this in three ways: 1. Make it [...]

It is generally agreed that languages can be roughly divided into two categories: stress-timed and syllable-timed. As a definition of each, we can say that in syllable-timed languages, syllables tend to follow each other at regular intervals, with an equal amount of time being allocated for each syllable. In stress-timed languages, on the other hand, [...]