Pronpack Sound Chart

A1 upwards
Teaching point: 
Pronunciation: the individual sounds of English
reference; exploration
PronPackChart IPA Hancock pronunciation phoneme ELT TESOL

This is a new phonemic chart of the sounds of English for the classroom wall or to hand out to students. You can download it below. Find an infographic explaining the chart here and an article explaining the chart here.

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Mark, I'm intrigued by your chart. I've done experiments with this kind of idea before, especially in terms of connecting colour to placement on the traditional chart, to the same sort of effect. Where does the CURE lexical set go? Unfortunately you've run out of spaces! And PALM I assume is merged with "Arm". That doesn't work so well for non-rhotic speakers, I'm afraid. I love how your chart words are all body parts. I suppose the unspoken thing we're supposed to figure out is that "clock" has a surplus of L, and that it's mere decency that is causing you to leave that letter in. ;-) (I can't imagine that you could make it through a class without some jackass making a comment to that effect...)
Mark Hancock's picture

Eric, I left out the CURE vowel because for many speakers it has merged with the FORK vowel. This chart is a pedagogic device and I don't believe students need to learn to distinguish these two vowels, since so many native speakers do not. PALM and ARM share the same symbol - there is a small bracketed (r) as part of this symbol (and several other vowels which are commonly r-coloured) on the chart. This hopefully makes the chart usable for both rhotic and non-rhotic users. See also my American version of the chart, where the (r) is no longer bracketed. Note that the colours of the chart are not hugely significant, merely replicating some of the structuring already present in the positioning.

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