If I have gained one clear insight into English teaching, it is that the love of language is best inspired through an emphasis on phonetics - or more simply, on sound. Onomatopoeia - a fun word for students to say, making it an easy device for them to recall - is the feature I teach more broadly as ‘sound effects’.

‘Onomatopoeia’ derives from late Latin and Greek, from onomat- ‘name’ + -poios ‘making’, to literally mean ‘word-making’. As a language device, onomatopoeia is the formation of words associated with the sounds they make - such as ‘fizzle’, ‘gulp’, ‘pop’ and ‘clang’. Yet beyond those more obvious examples, onomatopoeia is employed in English phrases composed of audible strings of sounds, making them lively and vivid. As rhetorical devices naturally overlap and coincide in their use, onomatopoeia frequently occurs in instances of alliteration and hyperbole (exaggeration): ‘The sun scorched my bare skin’; or ‘The dead leaves cracked and crunched beneath her boots’. The first example uses an onomatopoeic device known as ‘sibilance’, with the ‘s’ sounds suggesting the sizzling heat of the burning sun. The second uses sharp, plosive ‘d’, ‘c’ and ‘b’ sounds, amplifying the crushing action of the autumnal walk. In both instances of writing, the phrasing is born of the objects and actions it describes, in a longer form of ‘word-making’.

Onomatopoeia, therefore, has associate categories of sound that students should be encouraged to learn and reference. These ‘sound tools’ makes analysis infinitely more enjoyable, as they give students a license to describe the effects of language in fun and satisfying ways. Language analysis initially seems to be a rigid exercise - spot device, then state effect - but when students are able to describe words for how they sound, analysis is energised and enlivened by that added sensory perception.

The core set of ‘sound effects’ for language analysis are these:

sibilant - s, sh and ch (soft) - hissing effect;
plosive - b, p, t, d and c (sharp) or k - abrupt, bursting effect;
fricative - f (soft) and v (hard) - airy effect;
nasal - m and n - humming effect;
guttural - g and c (sharp) or k - throaty effect;
liquid - l and r - flowing, rolling effect.

To demonstrate what students can do when given these tools, here is one of my A-Level literature students describing Satan’s movements in serpent form, approaching Eve in Book 9 of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Like a ‘ship’, the devil, ‘enclos’d’ in ‘fit vessel’, sails closer, nearing the end of his voyage towards Eve. Milton’s description of Satan as a marine vessel breathes life into the phrase. The use of ‘vessel’ echoes how earlier in the poem, amid airy fricatives and sibilance which mimic the whisper of a snake’s slither, Satan carefully ‘considered every creature’ before settling on the ‘subtlest beast of all the field’.

When marking, my involuntary response to this sonorous brand of analysis is to write ‘Lovely’ in the margins - because it is lovely, and the richness of it clearly exhibits their love of what they are reading and writing.