Sunday 18 August 2013

Learning English on the Beach

In an earlier post, I wrote about learning English via rhyming monosyllabic words and I used the words that rhyme with bake as an example. Here I'm using beach as another example, hence the title of the post. The most common rhyming words are:

  • beech
  • breach and breech
  • bleach
  • each
  • leach and leech
  • peach
  • preach
  • reach
  • speech
  • screech
  • teach
There are of course Internet resources that can be used to check whether you've gotten all possible words. For this example, I used Rhymer. It's particularly useful for my purposes because it starts out by explicitly listing all the rhyming words of one syllable (followed by those of two and three syllables). In my reference system, the word that comes first in the alphabet is used to identify the list of rhyming words. This is different to the approach proposed in my initial post where I started with a root sound ake

Learning would take place using a suitable software program or combination of Internet resources that would allow the learner to hear the word, see its meaning explained in words and pictures, and be given examples of its contextual usage. For example, in the case of teach, the content might be:
  • pronunciation (a site like howjsay.com will provide this service as well as various TTS (Text-to-Speech) apps)
  • simple definition (give lessons to students) and graphic
  • contextual usage like Mrs Jones will teach us Mathematics this year.
Lastly, why does the word monosyllable have five syllables?

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