Do I need to know the phonemic alphabet to do a CELTA?

Do I have to learn the phonemic symbols to do a CELTA course?

The short answer is No. The slightly longer answer is 'No, you don't have to learn them, but even learning one or two of them will be useful'. You will probably be encouraged to make use of them a few times in your written assignments and in your lesson plans on a CELTA course, but there is no exam on the symbols during the course and there is absolutely no need to sit up all night studying them!

What's the point of phonemic script?

It is actually very useful. Spelling in English is often a very good indicator of how something is pronounced, but not always. If you take the words 'tough' and 'cough', we have the same final four letters, but the two words don't rhyme, so we need some way of showing that. If you take the words 'earth' and 'word', the 'ear' in 'earth' is the exact same sound as the 'or' in 'word'. We can only show this in writing if we have an alphabet that will show these sounds and that's the purpose of this alphabet.

It is true that being able to write out how something sounds is a little less important than it was. Now that so many students have access to the internet, they can use an online dictionary like the Cambridge Learners' Dictionary and listen to words as well as see them in writing. It's also a lot easier to access video and audio content in English than it used to be, so there is an argument that in the future it won't be as useful to be able to represent pronunciation in writing, but that day hasn't come yet and the phonemic script is still useful to language teachers and students for that reason.

But the phonemic script is so hard!

It really isn't! Firstly, the majority of the symbols represent exactly the sound most people expect them to, so for example, the sound /p/ is the sound that is usually written with the letter 'p' and the sound /r/ is the one that is usually written with the letter 'r'. The same is true of the majority of the consonants. There are more vowel sounds in English than there are vowels in the English alphabet, and so learning the vowels is a little trickier, but there is lots of help out there. A good starting place is YouTube. The classic series of videos from Adrian Underhill is a useful place to begin. He really breaks the chart down very simply in a step-by-step manner. There is lots more help on YouTube and elsewhere online too.

When should I use phonemic script on CELTA?

Ask your tutors! They will be able to advise you when you should and shouldn't use phonemic script.

In general, in teaching, we would recommend you use phonemic script to highlight only. What I mean by that is that transcribing whole sentences in phonemic script can be gobbledegook for both you and your students and will probably waste everyone's time. However, highlighting one difficult sound in a new word, where it is pronounced differently from what someone might expect from the spelling is an excellent chance to use phonemic script, for example, if I was teaching the word 'chemistry', I might pop the phoneme /k/ above the 'ch' in 'chemistry', so the students know that this the sound the 'ch' makes in this word.

When you write your assignments, follow the instructions you're given carefully. It's likely your tutors will ask you to make use of phonemic script in both the Focus on the Learner and the Language-Related Tasks assignments. Again, consider when it is useful to highlight specific sounds, rather than to laboriously transcribe whole words or sentences.

Final thoughts

A CELTA course involves lots of new information, in terms of teaching techniques and methods, in terms of grammar and in terms of pronunciation, but you should always remember that it is an initial training course and that perfection is never expected. CELTA courses run over relatively short periods of time and so whatever you do on the course will be achievable in the time provided. Don't be intimidated by the phonemic chart. Just like all other areas of entering a new profession, it will come with time!

CELTA course dates and fees

About the author:

Dr Connor O'Donoghue hails from Ireland and he started teaching English as a foreign language in Poland in 2003 and he became a CELTA trainer in 2008. He has taught and trained in Ireland, the UK, France, Italy, Slovenia, Macedonia, Poland, Russia, Kazakhstan and Vietnam. Connor also holds a Masters and a PhD in Education from Trinity College in Dublin. He has previously managed large teacher training centres in Vietnam and in London before founding DC Teacher Training.