Using the Appropriate Segmentals of Speech to successfully present a jazz chant, rap, and speech choir, you should be able to familiarize yourself with the sounds of English that may be classified into segmentals and suprasegmentals. But, you will be introduced first to segmentals which refer to the individual sounds of the English language. Sounds of English consist of vowels, consonants, and diphthongs. This lesson will focus on vowels as one of the classifications of English sounds (segmentals). Vowel is one of a class of speech sounds in the articulation of which the oral part of the breath channel is not blocked and is not constricted enough to cause audible friction for biblio. It is a speech sound made with the mouth open and the tongue in the middle of the mouth not touching the teeth and lips. It is a voiced sound which is nearly free from audible friction sounds (Atienza, 1997 as cited by Antonino et al., 2016). There are several ways to check whether it is a voiced sound. One is you can place your hand on your throat. Another is you can place your palm on top of your head. And still another is you can try placing your finger in your ear or in both ears. If you feel a vibration in your vocal folds or cords which is located inside the voice box (larynx) then it is a voiced sound. Producing a vowel sound is a challenge to non-native speakers like you because in spoken English there are about fourteen or fifteen of them as compared to written vowels such as a, e, i, o, u. This is precisely the reason why you find difficulty producing some of the words in English that consist of the other vowel sounds that are not found in our language. The tongue, being the most flexible muscle in the speech mechanism, is the chief articulator in order to produce the correct vowel sound. According to the position of the highest point of the tongue, vowels can be classified into front vowels, central vowels, and back vowels (Jones, 2002). th To facilitate the correct production of the other English vowel sounds, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is used. The table on the next page presents the English vowel sounds with the corresponding IPA symbols keywords, and transcriptions.​