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Unit 13 introduces us to teaching pronunciation and phonology. An effective teacher should consider teaching pronunciation as an essential part of the course. This unit focuses on stress, rhythm, intonation as well as concentrating on the International Phonetic Alphabet and its use in helping students to come to an understanding of the pronunciation of English. Phonology can therefore be defined as the study, science, analysis and classification of physical properties
Intonation can be defined as the variation in volume and pitch in as sentence. Intonation carries a message in a sentence and it is particularly important in questioning, agreeing or disagreeing or confirming a statement. It is also important in the expression of feelings or emotions (sadness, happiness etc.). the pattern of intonation in a statement can either take the form of a rise/fall pattern, fall/rise pattern and a level intonation, which is basically flat. However, a normal pattern intonation in English is the rise/fall pattern. Intonation patterns can also be powerful predictors of forth coming info. For instance, s sports reporter reading soccer results. This can be used as an activity to help attune students ears to intonation of predicting results.
There are various techniques for indicating and teaching intonation. These include: nonsense words, whereby teachers ask students what attitude to communicate (hostility, pride, boredom). Teachers can also use gestures by using hands to indicate whether the sentence starts on a high or low pitch and then indicate the direction of the pitch. Humming or singing to hear stress and intonation, and lastly writing on the board to show direction of the intonation
To interpret a sentence, one must be able to identify the stress in the sentence. This will help us to understand what the speaker is trying to say or imply. To do this we must identify the strong part of the sentence which is always stressed. For instance, ` He didn’t mean to kick the dog ‘. Here stress on `would‘ implies somebody else meant to do it, while a stress on `mean‘ would imply he kicked the dog by accident. It should be noted that adjectives and nouns with two syllabuses have a stress on the first syllable, verbs with two syllables have a stress on the last syllable, stress on penultimate syllable (words ending in -ic, -sion and -tion) like television have their stress on second to the last syllable. The stress here may also depend where the native English speaker is from. Stress on ante-penultimate syllable (words ending in -cy,- ty,- phy, -gy, -ive, -al) like democracy, relative, critical. Compound nouns, (stress on the first part) compound verbs and adjectives stress on second part).
There are also syllables without stress, which at times is impossible to hear or reproduce. Auxiliary verbs in all their forms (be, have, do) are rarely stressed except in certain cases like `He didn’t lose it `where‘ didn’t is stressed‘. Articles are also normally unstressed (a, an, the) and are pronounced like `er‘ with no hint of the `r‘ sound. In almost the same way, pronouns and prepositions are usually unstressed.
Techniques for indicating and teaching stress include: contrastive stress, whereby a student can more easily perceive a sound that is voiced by placing it alongside a sound that is not voiced. By gesture (clapping, clicking fingers etc.), using the board to underline the stressed word.
There are four major ways that sounds join together in English. This is by linking (marble arch becomes marblearch), sound dropping, sound changing and extra lettering (Anna and the kingdom become Anner and the kingdom)
We are also introduced to the phonemic symbols along with the International Phonemic Alphabet chart which is simply a set of symbols that represent the way English speakers put their words together to form words. When teaching the phonemic alphabet, one should forget the way a word is traditionally spelt and focus on the sounds you make when saying a particular word. It should be noted that in voice consonants you make noise when your vocal chords are vibrating, while unvoiced consonants is purely the movement of air with no vibration or vocal chords.
In this unit we are given a detailed explanation of articulation. In articulation, we use our vocal cords as well as other organs such as the tongue, larynx, glottis, alveolar ridge, the hard palate and soft palate. All these organs play an important part in the way we pronounce our words.
Teaching techniques for pronunciation of individual sound can be made fun by introducing activities such as peer diction (reading and speaking in pairs), using visuals by drawing a diagram of a mouth sowing how a particular sound is made, tongue twisters etc.
Teachers can teach pronunciation as a whole lesson so as to work on issues relevant to the needs of the students, during a lesson slot or when needed.
