SIBILANTS

ENGLISH LANGUAGE S.S.S2 THIRD TERM

WEEK TEN

THEME: SPEECH WORK

SIBILANTS

PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVE

Students should be able to;

1. Explain sibilants
2. Identify sibilants
3. Give examples of sibilants

CONTENT

Here are the English sibilants:

• s in 'bus'
• z in 'buzz'
• in 'hush'
• in 'leisure'
• in 'church'
• in 'judge'

Sibilants are the "s"-like sounds, the whistling fricatives. In Icelandic, there's only ones, which is alveolar and unvoiced. This means that Icelanders are not used to pronouncing postalveolar sibilants, and no voiced sibilants at all.

This is problematic, because the differences between the 4 English sibilants is very distinctive in English, and Icelanders tend to pronounce them all the same.

 

Problem 1: lack of voicing

In the Language Lab, listen to see whether…