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Unit 13 gives an overview on teaching pronunciation and phonology.
When teaching pronunciation, teachers should try to help students with their intonation and where to put stress on words.
Statements typically have rise/fall intonations. When someone wants someone to respond, or if they are expressing surprise or disagreement, the person will likely use a fall/rise intonation. Flat intonations indicate that the speaker is not interested in communicating or does not have much to say. Some intonation techniques include practicing with nonsense words, using gestures, humming, or writing marks on the board.
Teachers might also want to teach the importance and effect of stressing different words in a sentence. Stress is placed on syllables, and stress is usually placed on syllables that convey the most important information. Some teaching techniques for stress is providing contrastive stress examples, gestures, choral work, or writing stress marks on the board or on paper.
Another aspect of pronunciation that is important for students to learn is sound joining. The four typical sound joinings that occur in English are linking, sound dropping, sound changing, and extra lettering.
The phonemic alphabet is also helpful in teaching pronunciation because no matter the spelling of a word, the phonemic alphabet can represent how to say the word. To understand how to describe letters in the phonemic alphabet, you must understand the place and manner of articulation.
The places of articulation include palatal, palatal-alveolar, alveolar, dental, labio-dental, bilabial, and glottal. The manners of articulation include plosive, fricative, nasal, lateral, affricate, and approximate.
While an understanding of the phonemic alphabet is useful for the teachers, constant practice with real words that students will see might be more helpful when they learn pronunciation.
