12 songs to practice the pronunciation of -ED endings

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As you know, the “-ed” endings of regular past tense verbs can be pronounced in three different ways: /t/, /d/, and /ɪd/, which is the one most students tend to overuse. Click here for an overview of the rules.

Over the years, I have found that /t/ and /d/ are easier to notice and to produce if the verb comes immediately before a word beginning with a vowel sound:

liked it – /laɪktɪt/
dreamed of – /driːmdəv/

To help students get their tongues around the two sounds, I usually ask them to move /t/ and /d/ to the front of the vowel sound. This makes it obvious that there’s no room for /ɪ/:

liked it – /laɪk tɪt/
dreamed of – /driːm dəv/

Out of all the ideas and techniques I’ve used in class, this has probably been the most effective.

So I decided to put together a 7-minute video containing 12 song excerpts you can use to help your students notice how /t/ and /d/ are linked to the vowel sounds that follow. They are old songs, but I hope the activity will still appeal to students.

The video is suitable for late A2, B1, B2, and even C1 students, who will have learned the basic -ED rules but may still struggle to produce the sounds accurately. The on-screen activities are all self-explanatory.

You will notice that the activities do not test whether students can choose between /t/ and /d/. The difference is barely audible in fast connected speech, and it rarely causes misunderstandings. Also, since most students tend to overuse /ɪd/ and avoid /t/ or /d/, the song excerpts focus on the latter rather than the former.

By the way, if the video is out of synch, go back to the beginning and/or refresh the page.

Thanks for reading – and watching.

93 thoughts on “12 songs to practice the pronunciation of -ED endings”

  4. Thanks a million for sharing this material. I will use them with my students in a couple of weeks when I have to teach past simple. I bet it will work well, especially because I have used phonemic transcription with them in class.

    Reply

      • Thanks so much for sharing this video, Luiz! 🙂 In face-to-face lessons, my secondary learners are struggling with ‘ED’ pronunciation. I will try to use this video to help them improve their pronunciation, and I believe they will love it. 🙂

        Reply
  11. Pingback: 12 songs to practice the pronunciation of -ED endings | We Are La Presentación
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  21. Hi Luiz! It’s been a while since the last time I was here, don’t know why.Your work always amazes me!
    Talking about this particular activity, I absolutely loved your technique of asking students to move /t/ and /d/ to the front of the vowel sound, brilliant! I’ll be using it soon.
    A funny thought crossed my mind while I watched the video, your mind must race every time you hear a song, thinking about all the sounds and how you can use that to teach, can you enjoy the music itself? Just kidding 🙂
    Thanks a bunch!

    Reply

    • Hi Luisa, yes, you’re right. Hard to enjoy music / sitcoms / movies to the fullest – I’m always looking for things I could use as teaching material. Thank you for your kind words.

      Reply

  23. This is fantastic! I’m going to type up and print out the examples of the verbs with the word after it and have my students first predict and put them in two columns that that think have the “t” or “d” ending sound. We’ll see how it works.

    Reply

  25. What an awesome activity, Luiz! Fun and effective. I really like how it also practices other sounds and helps students with connected speech. Thanks a lot for your generosity in sharing it!

    Reply

  32. Olá Luiz Otavio

    Como posso comprar o seu livro? Tenho interesse na habilidade de escrever bem e gostaria do livro 600 examples of academic language.

    Esse livro ajuda quem quer aprender a escrever para web bem assim para o leitor comum ou é apenas para teses de faculdade?

    Reply
  33. Pingback: Videos for pronunciation | Online Language Learning

  34. Luiz Otávio, tks 4 sharing such a great and useful masterpiece. I’ve already sent it to some friends and will use w/ some students. Gr8 job, dear.

    Reply

  35. Thank you so much, sincerely, for putting together such a useful, well thought-out video.
    When students are taught grammar rules only, they miss out on such richer worlds.
    Like in this case, where correct pronunciation and linking sounds make a mere tense alive.

    Reply

  36. Thanks SO much for sharing this – it’s amazing!! Really generous of you to share what couldn’t have been easy to create.

    Reply

  38. This video is wondelful!!! My students were singing and easily understood the use /t/ and /d/ at the end of regular verbs. Thank you so much!!!

    Reply

  39. Actually there are five ways to pronounce ed in the past tense. That said I love your passion for teaching and will be using your video 😀

    Reply

  45. Luis, this is great! Thank you for sharing. Do you have any other ways that you use songs in your classes? I recently watched Paul Seligson’s IATEFL Chile talk on using songs in the classroom on youtube. I think that you might enjoy it, lots of great ideas. Oh yes, what do you use to cut/edit the videos to the short exerpts ? :0)

    Reply

  46. Great choice of songs, and there are several chances for students to practice, thanks to the fine editing. As for the tongue twister in 12, that may be due to the way native speakers tend to drop ‘t’s before ‘w’s (as in that we). My students love your video lessons and they are usually not very easily impressed, so thank you and please keep sharing.

    Reply

  48. This is a great resource. Be careful, however, with the phonetic transcriptions. For example, “locked out” in the American and Canadian dialects will change the /t/ to a /d/. It’s the same with “walked out.”

    Reply

    • Hi Julie,
      /k/ is a voiceless sound, so, theoretically, at least, the /t/ should sound like /t/, shouldn’t it?
      Do you have any references to back this up?

      Reply

  49. actually there are five ways to pronounce ed in the past tense. That said I love your passion for teaching and will be using your video

    Reply

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