Rhyming

Steven Donahue explores the various ways that Mother Goose Rhymes can be used in the ESL classroom.

Story and verse are a primary way that English children absorb the linguistic lessons of their first language. Embedded in the seemingly simple rhymes are complex language patterns about intonation, rhythm, stress, and individual vowels and consonants. By pointing out these linguistic phenomena to ESL learners, they will be better able to sort out the seeming inconsistencies of what they are hearing in the real English speaking world.

Practice of P, T, K
[rule: difference between voiced and voiceless stops and aspiration of initial voiceless stops]
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man!
So I will, master, as fast as I can;
Pat it, and prick it, and mark it with T,
Put it in the oven for Tommy and me.

With Pat-a-Cake, the student is told to focus on pronouncing the voiceless stop series: P, T, K. The student is shown how P is pronounced fully in the front of the mouth with both lips; T is pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching just behind the front teeth; and K is pronounced with the back of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth. For most students it is not necessary to invoke the precise terminology such as bilabial, alveolar, or velar. The student is told to focus on the voiceless pattern of the sounds P, T, K as compared to their twin
voiced sounds B, D, G.

A second pattern that can be demonstrated with this rhyme is the aspiration that occurs after the voiced stops P, T, K. Students can hold a piece of paper close to their lips while reciting the poem and watch the paper move from the aspirated air.

Linking
[rule: If a word or syllable ends in a single consonant and is followed by a word with a vowel, the consonant is produced as if it
belonged to both words]
Jack be nimble,
And Jack be quick;
And Jack jump over
The candlestick.

Linking is a linguistic phenomena where the end of one word starts the beginning of a second word. In this Mother Goose Rhyme, "jump over" actually sounds like "JUM" and "POVER". This is no small issue for second language learners who may run to the dictionary trying to look up a non-existent "Pover". Here, the linking rule is gone over so that the student understands that it occurs with words that end in other consonants. Examples include "gone over"? GO NOVER; "stop it"? STO PIT, and "bug off" ? BU GOFF.

Tapped T
[rule: when double "t" comes in the middle of a word, it sounds somewhat like a quickly tapped "d"]
[rule: if a word has /t/ or /d/ as a second member of a triple cluster, it can be deleted]

Come, butter, come
Come, butter, come!
Peter stands at the gate,
Waiting for a buttered cake;
Come, butter, come.

The accent of many foreigners is partly exhibited by the hypercorrect pronunciation of certain words. Here the word "butter" sounds like "budder" and the word "waiting" sounds like "wading". Few native speakers would pronounce the "t" sound in the middle of this word. At times it is revelatory for the ESL student to realize that they are correctly hearing the "d" sound and not
the spelling convention "t".

A second pronunciation point in this short poem is the line "Peter stands at the gate". Here, native speakers will delete the "d" sound so that it sounds like "Stan’s". This is a common adjustment that native speakers use to more easily handle challenging consonant clusters such as "n-d-s". Other common examples of this occur with the words "winter" as "winner" , "printer" as "prinner" and " Atlanta" as "Adlana".