 In this video, we'll be looking at the International Phonemic Alphabet and how it's used in the classroom. There are other phonemic alphabets, but this is the most popular and the system which is most widely used. You may have seen some of these symbols before as any good dictionary will supplement standard English spellings with the phonemic spellings to aid in pronunciation practice. Here we have a situation where we have what are called phonemes and each phoneme represents a sound within the English language. How is this helpful? Well, what it does is help students understand how to say words rather than simply relying on the often archaic English spellings. To illustrate this point, let's for a moment put ourselves in the shoes of our students when trying to understand how to say the following words.