England and səm pɪˈkjuːlɪə sawndɪŋ tawnz

As an Englishman I'm always tickled pink by the attempts at non-English folk's attempts at pronouncing some of the England's more peculiar City, Town and Village names. That said a huge slice of humble pie had to be eaten back in the summer when I visited a town called Snettisham. I fell foul of a counter intuitively pronounced town and for that very reason I set about putting together a class. To help those who come to our land and hope to speak free from the embarrassment of Lei-ces-ter Square.



The way I've set it is is with a powerpoint introduction of the 5 selected locations around England with a few pictures and facts about each place. At this stage I don't mention how to pronounce the towns. and get students to read each slide. (You can find all the materials here. The powerpoint and worksheet are both titled"Town names pron")

The next step is to put students into pairs (using the red and yellow section of the tables) or groups of three (in this case use the blue section of the table) and give each member of the group one of the worksheets here.

It then becomes an information swap by them using their partner. Next they work together to complete their tables and/or the one on the white board, on which you can have a different information gap task.





When students have completed the task get them to look through each of the words ad spell the the individual sounds to help demonstrate the various different ways sounds can be spelled in our wonderfully prepossessing language.

This activity always works better when student shave a basic knowledge of phonemic script but can be done as a cryptography class without any knowledge and a simple copy of the chart.



I trust you'll have a giggle with this and perhaps learn something new yourself.

'til the next time.

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