I recently taught a two-week, crash-course ESL class to a married couple from Carmen, Mexico. I have to say, it was both enlightening and exciting. Not only did I aid in the knowledge base of the couple, but I also expanded and developed my own teaching strategies. Near the end of the session, I got into sibilants.

Sibilants are consonant sounds that make a hiss, which comes from air rushing through the narrow valley we make with our tongue when pronouncing words.

There are two kinds of sibilants: Voiced and Voiceless

Voiced Sibilants: his /z/ beige /ʒ/ badge /dʒ/

Voiceless Sibilants: hiss /s/ wash /ʃ/ batch /tʃ/

Needless to say, it was very difficult to explain the difference other than to just practice the sounds repeatedly. We would sit at the table together and practice the sibilant from the word beige, interestingly the hardest sound to make as a Spanish speaker because that sound does not exist in the Spanish language. Even more interesting, I would often hear them say the sibilants from badge and batch the same way, and would again have to practice the pronunciation.

For my classes, it is not only important to know the words, it is also important to know the pronunciation. My students often tell me that it’s very hard for them to talk to English speakers because we pronounce the words differently than they had learned, so they could not understand us, and vice versa.

Before I taught sibilants to that couple, I had no previous knowledge that the hissing sounds in words even had a name, so it was a learning experience for both the student and the teacher.

Keep learning, my friends!