Do you remember the famous professor Higgins and his 'student' Eliza Doolitle? Can you remember the phrases he makes her repeat all the time until she gets them right?
“The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain”
“In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.“
Can you pronounce them easily? Well, some people can, but other people struggle to do it. Why is that so? The answer is that these two sentences belong to the group of the so-called
tongue twisters. A tongue twister is a phrase/ sentence/text specially designed for practicing pronunciation of certain consonants, vowels or consonant clusters. I consider them a very powerful 'teachers' tool' for enabling students prunounce whatever they want. And, above all, it's fun! Isn't that what all teachers want: both fun and learning for their students? They are suitable for learners of all ages, especially for children, because of the 'fun' effect they bear. Here are a few more examples of tongue twisters :
Picky people pick Peter Pan Peanut-Butter, 'tis the peanut-butter picky people pick.
If Stu chews shoes, should Stu choose the shoes he chews?
Through three cheese trees three free fleas flew.
While these fleas flew, freezy breeze blew.
Freezy breeze made these three trees freeze.
Freezy trees made these trees' cheese freeze.
That's what made these three free fleas sneeze.
Whether the weather be fine
or whether the weather be not.
Whether the weather be cold
or whether the weather be hot.
We'll weather the weather
whether we like it or not.
And, finally, a brilliant one:
If Dr. Seuss Were a Technical Writer
Here's an easy game to play.
Here's an easy thing to say:
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!
If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,
then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!
You can't say this? What a shame, sir!
We'll find you another game, sir.
If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,
That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss,
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!
When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk,
And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk,
Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to ram your rom.
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!
These tongue twister poems can inspire you to come up with dozens of new activities for your students. They might make up their own tongue twisters according to what they need to practice or make chain tongue twisters ( each student contributes with the words he/she needs to practice ). Be as it may, this type of exercising can make a language classroom a room full of laugh, fun and creativity.
The examples were taken from: http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/en.htm
