English Phonetic Alphabet with IPA Vowel Chart Examples

English phonetic alphabet and IPA chart are good for teaching phonetic symbols. Phonetic symbols chart will make it easy for students to learn pronunciation. Alphabet phonetic chart contains essential consonants and vowels organised in a phonemic chart. Luckily, there are some interactive phonetic chart that make it easy for us to learn phonetic symbols. The chart contains international phonetic alphabet so that the source is complete enough to learn more how many languages use them to produce speech sounds.

Teaching English pronunciation using technology of ipa chart of the international phonetic alphabet is so much fun and a lot easier. When I was in the university, studying English, my teacher taught me English pronunciation using printed books and provide me phonetic symbols chart of English phonemes.

It was a good interaction between teacher and students in which there was a feeling that the teacher took efforts to explain it to us. I would like to thank to my English pronunciation teacher for teaching us about ipa chart from the international phonetic alphabet.

The only draw back of this teaching method is that once the teacher and students go home, and students want to study it again at home, no more example sound from the ipa chart given as the teacher is already at home.

At that time, the solution was to use audio from cassette or mp3 played on desktop computer or laptop. With cassette, it was difficult to replay particular audio, I had to rewind and forward again and again, which is frustrating and time consuming. With computer, at that time, I played the audio using a very popular mp3 player software, Winamp. This was easier than using cassette because I could just press back and forward arrow and went to particular timeline to hear certain sounds of the phonetic symbols chart.

But now,

As the technology for education is growing so fast, we have interactive phonemic chart or english phoneme chart published by British Council Teaching English. Learning with ipa chart of international phonetic alphabet becomes more fun. Here is what it looks like:

Interactive Phonemic Chart to Teach Pronunciation

All English phonetics are displayed in box style. Click each phoneme and you will hear the sound. Hover the down arrow on the right top corner of each phoneme box and you will see three example words representing the phoneme. Click each word to hear the sound. This interactive pronunciation teaching media was developed with flash and it was published with .swf extension. It is embedded in the html page of teachingenglish.org.uk.

You can use it online directly in the page or download it to your computer so that you can use it without internet connection.

you can try it here online: (sorry it’s not available anymore as it was built on Flash, and that now flash is no longer supported by browsers).

Alternatively, you can use the mobile version:

Mac Version: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apple-store/id387588128

Android Version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.britishcouncil.phonemicchart&hl=in&gl=US

How to use interactive phonemic chart with English phonetic alphabet as a classroom teaching media

This interactive phonetic chart containing ipa chart can be used in classroom. Using this media, a teacher can demonstrate each phoneme and check students skill improvement. It effectively gets the students attention, builds engagement to the lesson. You can follow the steps:

Download or open the interactive phonemic chart / ipa chart.
Display it in big screen TV or just display it using LCD projector to the wall of screen projector.
Provide good quality active speaker. Make sure that the sound is loud enough or just comfortable for the classroom volume.
Start teaching.
First, click each phoneme from the first until the final phoneme. Before moving to the next phoneme, allow students to follow by repeating the phoneme sound you just clicked. You can repeat this until your students seem to develop the skill in pronouncing the phoneme well.
Second, Repeat each phoneme but this time follow the sample words in the down arrow. there are three example words of each phoneme.
Copy the .swf file and let your students have the file or give them the link so that they can open it. It is up to them whether they want to save it offline or just use it online. Then, invite them to study further at home.
Inform them that you are going to test them individually.

Testing and Assessing Students’ English phonemic skills improvement with English phonetic alphabet

After encouraging students using the interactive English phonemic chart / ipa chart for their autonomous learning at home, you can test the improvement by asking them one by one and ask them to pronounce individual phoneme and example words not by using the interactive chart but by using printed phonetic symbol with sample words like below:

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If you want to see more about the printable English phonetic chart / ipa chart, please visit: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/phonemic-symbols

It provides you with pdfs of all phonetic symbol of the ipa chart. You can print all of them for teaching media which you can hold during explaining or testing. Or, you can use them as classroom poster. Stick them to the wall to give more exposure for learning English. Thanks to the developer: https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/

I have used this method in my class. It was very exciting. My students love it so much and they developed their English pronunciation skills very well.