Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Great Sites For Teaching How to Pronounce 'ed' Endings

A common problem adult learners of English often have is how to pronounce the 'ed' ending on words.

I always wind up spending time on this when teaching the past simple verb tense and decided to look for sites to help students learn and practice on their own. Here are a few recommendations.


TOP PICKS
Here are my top picks of sites with resources to help students learn and remember how to pronounce 'ed' at the end of words:

1. Elemental English http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j32SurxnE4s

2. Perfect English Grammar
 http://www.perfect-english-grammar.com/how-to-pronounce-ed.html 

 3. The English Club
http://www.englishforeveryone.org/Topics/Pronouncing-ED-Endings.htm

 4. English Maven
http://www.englishmaven.org/
http://www.englishmaven.org/Pages/Pronouncing%20ED%20Endings.htm

IN MORE DETAIL:
1. Elemental English has a great 8 minute video on this topic so students can watch, see the spelling and hear the pronunciation for the different endings. It goes on to describe why the 'ed' pronunciation changes. The lesson is described with words of the lesson listed right below the video as well, for those who prefer to read rather than listen and watch:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j32SurxnE4s



2.  Perfect English Grammar gets to the heart of the lesson immediately, with a short written explanation of each rule followed by lots of examples (written and audio clips) of each way 'ed' can pronounced.
http://www.perfect-english-grammar.com/how-to-pronounce-ed.html





3. I liked this description from The English Club site because it had a 2:36 minute audio clip:
http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/-ed.htm
 English Club - ' ed' endings
English Club - 'ed' Endings page
Related to this, you can find a worksheet that uses a lot of the same examples as you find on English Club here: English for Everyone has a free, printable worksheet and answer key on this topic:
http://www.englishforeveryone.org/Topics/Pronouncing-ED-Endings.htm

Worksheet:http://www.englishforeveryone.org/PDFs/Pronouncing%20ED%20endings.pdf

Answer key:  http://www.englishforeveryone.org/PDFs/Pronouncing%20ED%20endings%20-%20answers.pdf

4.  English Maven  has 5 interactive multiple choice exercises and one final exam for students to practice what they have learned. (One page has the explanation and another a list of exercises and final exam.)
http://www.englishmaven.org/Pages/Pronouncing%20ED%20Endings.htm
If the link above doesn't work, then go to the homepage and search for 'ed' endings.
http://www.englishmaven.org/

Screenshot of Exercise 1


Screenshot of the lesson portion of the English Maven website: 


More Words -If you are having trouble thinking of examples of words that end with 'ed', look no further:http://www.morewords.com/ends-with/ed/


 I also considered (but can't really recommend):
5 Minute English  http://www.5minuteenglish.com/apr18.htm
 I liked the clean layout and explanation of how to pronounce the different 'ed' endings ( voiced / unvoiced), and the fact that there was a quick quiz at the end to check your understanding, but without an audio clip or video clip it would be hard to make sense of the lesson unless you were a native speaker, or had one with you while reading through the lesson.


I hope this proves useful to you!






1 comment:

  1. Having students rewrite the rules in their own words is a great idea that I had never thought of. I will definitely give it a try!

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    ReplyDelete

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