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This unit deeply defines the importance and techniques (e.g. teaching techniques on stress & intonation) to be aware when mastering pronunciation and phonology. In particular, phonology is a classification of the physical properties of sounds. It includes the areas of stress, rhythm and intonation, and the concentration of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
From my observations, this unit reconfirms the fact that intonation is very important as it can provide variation and pitch in a whole sentence, in which intonation patterns can also be extremely effective predicators of the nature of giving/receiving forthcoming information during our daily conversation. However, stress is more concerned with individual words/vocabulary.
In my future lessons, I need to be able to tell my students that different intonation can carry different messages in a sentence, especially in context of questioning (e.g. rise/fall, fall/rise and flat), agreeing or disagreeing or confirming statements.
On the other hand, I have also become more well-versed in using “stress” and its 2 simple rules when applying it. The idea is that one word only has one stress and cannot have two stresses. We can only stress syllables, but not the individual vowels or consonants.
The word that we stress the most is the strong part of the meaning of the sentence. More importantly, I realized that articles, pronouns and prepositions are generally unstressed, but most of the time we stress verbs to emphasize and appreciate speaker’s meaning.
Also, I gained some more understanding in terms of "Place of Articulation". They include palatal, palatal-alveolar, alveolar, dental, labio-dental, bilabial and glottal. This concept is also associated with Manner of Articulation, including plosive, fricative, nasal, lateral, affricate and approximant. In fact, as a new learner, this knowledge can be quite hard to understand. In my personal view, it will take a lot of time and patience to practice, and accumulate the relevant experience.
Lastly, this chapter has also given me some more idea as to the kinds of activities that I can introduce to my lessons when teaching pronunciation of individual sounds. The activities can contain “peer dictation”, “modeling sounds using your own mouth”, drawing mouth diagram” and so on.
