www.pronsci.com 1
Brita Haycraft Spoken English Award 2012: International House Trust and IATEFL
“The most successful pronunciation class I ever taught”
Teaching stress and reduced forms using a fidel
Roslyn Young
A month ago, I worked with a group of about...
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www.pronsci.com 1
Brita Haycraft Spoken English Award 2012: International House Trust and IATEFL
“The most successful pronunciation class I ever taught”
Teaching stress and reduced forms using a fidel
Roslyn Young
A month ago, I worked with a group of about 20 French adults who all had between five and seven
years of school English. They said they had difficulty understanding English speakers.
I put the PronSci British English fidel on the wall. (This is a new version of Gattegno's fidel.) A fidel
is a chart which groups together all the possible spellings for each sound, the different sounds being
distinguished from each other using colour: all the spellings of /e/ in blue, those of /m/ in orange,
etc. The vowel spellings are placed at the top of the chart in nineteen blocks of colour with the
twenty-four consonant blocks underneath.
The PronSci version of the fidel adds a third section for English, the schwa family, consisting of
schwa itself, schwi (found in ‘happy’ and the first sy
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