Hey there, and welcome to the video. Today we're here to talk about this...
This sound. The schwa. Imagine, if you will, that you are a moody teenager and
suddenly your mum comes to your bedroom and asks you, are you hungry? To which you
might reply, uh. This is the schwa sound and it's right here in the middle of the
IPA vowel chart. The schwa sound can be described as a very short sound which is
central in the mouth and is produced with a relaxed tongue. Actually, the schwa is
the most common vowel sound in English. It helps us to speak words quicker and in
a more fluent way and it's used in unstressed syllables. So let's take a look
at some examples of the schwa sound. Here you can see four normal English words
but we would not pronounce them in the way they are spelled. By that I mean power,
harbour, prolong, anoi. And that's because although they have two syllables, one syllable
is a stressed syllable and the other one is an unstressed syllable. The unstressed
syllables actually have schwa sounds in them. So we should hear power, power,
harbour, harbour, prolong, prolong, anoi, anoi. And how about some longer words?
We don't say container, glamourous, gorilla, forgetful, no. That's because we
have this pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. So here we can hear
container, container, glamourous, glamourous, gorilla, gorilla, forgetful, forgetful.
And just for fun, let's have a look at some even longer words. As you can see here, we don't
say information, information or accuracy, accuracy, no. That's because we need to add
schwa sounds to these words as well. So we should say information, information, accuracy,
accuracy, apology, apology, comedian, comedian. It's as simple as that. Okay, now it's your turn.
Replay the previous part of the video and then read and repeat the words in the list. You may
like to record yourself reading the words and upload your recording to the Padlet page by
scanning the QR code to see what other watchers of this video think of your schwa pronunciation.
Okay, thank you for watching and see you in part two.