With all three of these suggestions, you have the two options of mixing the letters up with words as part of a more general pronunciation lesson or doing a whole lesson on the alphabet, perhaps even including all three approaches. C/D), and many books contain a similar activity where students match the letters by their vowel sound. This could include letters that rhyme with each other (e.g.

Many of these are used as abbreviations in texting and informal online communication, making for a natural link to a lesson on “CU” for “see you” and “2moro” for “tomorrow”.įor letters of the alphabet that don’t have homophones in English, you could get students to match them to rhyming words, e.g.

There are also many words that are homophones of English letters, e.g. B and V) that are minimal pairs of letters of the alphabet. For example, many of the activities described in the article on minimal pairs (see link below) will work with the alphabet, as there are plenty of examples of words (e.g. Most pronunciation activities can easily be adapted to be used with the alphabet. The easiest way to find and think of age-appropriate activities to practise the alphabet with adults is hiding in the second word of the title of this article – pronunciation. This article is about how to find and come up with sufficiently interesting and age-appropriate activities to be able to spend the right amount of time on this important point. This is an issue in our field because many adult learners do have problems with things like spelling out addresses and email addresses in English, something that often comes up in situations like telephoning and listening in EFL exams. None of these are suitable for adults, however, and there are few similar resources for native speaker adults for EFL teachers to attempt to adapt. View all licence free (pmr446) 0.Teaching children how to say the English alphabet is easy and fun, with numerous resources for native-speaking kids like the ABC Song and Sesame Street easily adaptable for EFL learners.HANDY PRINTABLE GRAPHIC OF THE NATO PHONETIC ALPHABET It is now very widely used by all types of 'professional communicators' including air traffic control, the police and other emergency services, shipping, etc and in all types of business. They had to make sure that each chosen word sounded different to the others, and was easily pronounceable by speakers of all the European languages, not just in English. It is called the 'NATO' alphabet because it was standardised by the NATO member countries back in the 1950s to allow accurate exchange of radio messages between air, naval and army forces of all the NATO member nations. Numbers are pronounced as normal, except often 9 is pronounced ' Niner' so it doesn't get confused with 5. The standard 'NATO' phonetic alphabet (actually the International Radio-Telephony Spelling Alphabet) is:Īlfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu. The 'NATO' / ICAO / ITU Phonetic Alphabet / Army Alphabet / Police Alphabet Using the phonetic alphabet to spell out names, locations and so on makes accurately understanding messages a lot easier, because many letters can be easily confused when heard over a crackly radio link (B, C, D, P, T and M, N and F, S, etc). When you are spelling out a name, location, code, registration number, postcode etc, over a noisy or faint radio or phone link, it is easy for letters and numbers to be misheard. Standard Phonetic Alphabets Used For Radio & Telephone Using Phonetic Alphabets Helps Convey Information Accurately Over Walkie-Talkie Radio

English alphabet and spelling