Schwa Sylables

 

They had recently started my British English Pronunciation Course and wanted to make a few observations. With just a few days of training under their belt, they told me that they already felt they had discovered one of the keys to drastically improving their pronunciation - awareness.

If you are not aware of common pronunciation mistakes, then how can you possibly correct them? Pronunciation training is often neglected in English lessons, with teachers correcting students on a word-by-word basis. In my course, we start by breaking pronunciation down into individual sounds. How can you master the pronunciation of a word, if you can't correctly produce one of its consonant or vowel sounds?

Take a look at the schwa sound, for example:

behind

amaze

control

financial

suppose

All of these words feature the schwa sound.

Any of the vowel letters can spell out the schwa sound - a, e, i, o, u and even y.

How do we make the schwa sound?

The lips are relaxed. The tongue is relaxed in the middle of the mouth, as in these words:

A huge mistake that students often make is pronouncing the letters that they see in a written word. The way an English word is written often doesn’t truly indicate how that word is pronounced, unlike in other languages, like Spanish.

This happens a lot with the schwa sound, as seen in these commonly mispronounced examples:

eleven

canal

equal

Remember: the schwa always appears in the unstressed syllables of words of multiple syllables.