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In this unit, I learned about how to teach pronunciation, the area of English language teaching that is most often neglected. However, any effective teacher will incorporate pronunciation teaching into their lessons and this is a topic that students often say is really important to them.
Phonology is the study, science, analysis and classification of the physical properties of sound. Phonology is used to describe the whole sound system of a language and it includes things like stress, rhythm and intonation. Intonation is the variation in volume and pitch in a whole sentence whereas stress focuses on individual words. Teaching intonation is really important because it can change the whole meaning of a sentence. Two intonation patterns include rise/fall and fall/rise. Falling at the end of the sentence indicates that you are finished speaking whereas rising at the end of the sentence can mean that you are asking a question or that you still have something to say. In teaching intonation, it can be effective to use nonsense words activities (where they express attitude through intonation rather than words), hand gestures, humming or singing, or writing on the board.
In teaching stress, here are two simple rules about stresses that can be effective to teach. First, words only have one stress and second, we can only stress syllables, not individual consonants or vowels. In teaching stress you can use a contrastive stress activity (where you give examples of incorrect and correct stresses), gestures like clapping, singing rhythms, and using stress marks. It can also be important to teach how sounds join in english through linking, sound dropping, sound changing and extra lettering.
An important tool for English teachers to understand is the phonemic alphabet, which divides sounds into their actual sounds as opposed to the actual alphabet which is an approximation of what they sound like. It is also important to understand articulation and how we make sounds. The place of articulation is the part of the mouth where the sounds originate and the manner of articulation is how we make the sounds. To teach individual sounds you can use activities like mouth visual, peer dictation, phonemes and tongue twisters. You can choose to do entire lessons on pronunciation or just incorporate pronunciation activities into lessons when they are needed.
