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The teaching of pronunciation is important and neglected because different types of pronunciation can give different meaning to a sentence and the teachers can lack the training and confidence to tackle this subject.
The intonation is the variation in volume and pitch in a whole sentence. It carries the message in a sentence and also carries the expression of emotions or feelings (identified via the fall/rise or rise/fall pattern, etc). Techniques that can be used to indicate intonation and stress are usually: nonsense words, use of gestures, humming or singing, making use of the board.
The strong part is the stressed word, or word that bears the principal emphasis in the sentence. Only the vital syllables in the words conveying the essential information are stressed. Contrastive stress, gestures, choral work, the board and stress marks are the main techniques for indicating and teaching stress.
Pronunciation can affect the quality of a student’s communication in many ways. For one, mispronouncing words can alter the meaning of what is being and eventually lead to misunderstanding. In other cultures, people who often mispronounce words are sometimes perceived as uneducated. If this happens, it can seriously affect the confidence of the English learner and hamper his/her learning. There are four major ways in English pronunciation that sounds are joined and linked together: linking, sound dropping, sound changing and extra lettering. The closer that students can link words together, the more natural their speech will sound. However, this part is a tough skill to learn, therefore, the teachers should be realistic in their teaching and be prepared to accept intelligibility instead of waiting for the perfection from the students.
Learning the phonemic alphabet is beneficial to students and teachers alike because it serves as a standard pronunciation guide for all varieties of English. If students are familiar with the IPA system, then they can easily improve their learning on their own. They can learn how to correctly pronounce words using this system because it is consistent. It’s also important to language learners whose 1st language lack sounds that are present in the English language.
