The purpose of this guide is to teach the international speaker how to pronounce a key sound in the English language represented as [ə] in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and known as “schwa”. Speakers who learn English as a second language can dramatically progress towards native fluency if they learn to detect the presence of this sound in words. It is difficult for students who have never been instructed to detect this sound (or phoneme), because it can be represented by no less than five different letters of the English alphabet.