Windsor, Colorado TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

In this unit, I learned a lot on the importance of pronunciation and phonology. These are often overlooked in teaching English because teachers are often not taught it themselves. However, it can be quite helpful for non-native learners. Some things I learned in this unit is the benefits or pronunciation and stress, intonations, and the phonemic chart. Pronunciation can help convey meaning when speaking; such as if the person is excited, if they need to add stress or importance, or even if they are asking a question. Adding stress to a certain part of a sentence can convey a different message to the listen depending on where the stressed word is pronounced. For example, the sentence 'I didn't mean to do it', if the speaker put more emphasis on the word 'I', it conveys that someone else meant to do it. If they put the emphasis on 'mean', it would imply that they did it on accident. Intonations is considered to be the variation in volume and pitch in a sentence. If you have a rise/fall intonation, it conveys that the speaker intends to say on more, but the listener can speak if they so wish when you are done talking. While the/rise intonation indicates surprise or disagreement, but mostly indicates that the speaker wants a response from the listener in return. A phonemic chart was made up with different symbols, where each symbol represents each different sound that is found in the English language. This helps English learners' learn how to properly pronounce words when trying to read the words instead of trying to rely on the original English spelling, which can often be confusing on pronunciations. For example, words like dough and boat share the same 'oh' sound.