TONGUE TWISTERS, TRABALENGUAS, FOR LANGUAGE PRACTICE
Tongue twister (trabalenguas): is a sentence that is hard to articulate because it has a succession of similar consonant or vowel sounds: Un tigre, dos tigres, tres tigres. She sells seashells on the seashore. In order to ease the mastery of sounds I have cooked up tongue-twisting drills that will pave the way to practice phonemes –a unit of a phonetic system, a single sound- in a simple and practical manner. Language acquirement is thought of as a mental process where the intellect plays the dominant role, thus we forget that it is also a physical task: language involves –of course- sound, and human sound is made by airflow in the larynx, and articulated and modulated by the different parts of the mouth: lips, teeth, tongue, alveolar ridges, hard and soft palate and even the nose. In a nutshell: language is also a mechanical technique that involves using accurately parts of the human anatomy to produce the right sounds. It implies a physical skill , ...