Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Texas? Are you interested in teaching English in Winona, Texas? Check out our opportunities in Winona, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!
This lesson focused on an often neglected part of TEFL: pronunciation and phonology. Phonology is the study of the physical properties of sounds, which includes stress, rhythm, and intonation. Intonation refers to the varying of volume and pitch in a sentence, and can convey agreement, disagreement, emotions, questions, and confirmation. I think intonation is very important in English, as encapsulated in the phrase, "it's not what you say, it's how you say it." Rising and falling intonations can have many coded meanings including one's mood, or whether or not one has finished speaking. Using gibberish, gesturing, humming/singing, or writing on the board can all be used to help convey intonation.
Another fascinating part of this lesson covered was the stress on words. Changing the word you stress in a sentence to utterly change its meaning; in turn, our interpretation of a sentence's meaning is based on what is stressed. Also, each word have syllables that are either stressed or unstressed, and its crucial to understand this to pronounce a word correctly. One can teach the stress in each word by doing an incorrect, followed by correct, pronunciation of a word. Stress can be taught by gesture, chanting, or on the board with symbols. This lesson also covers the linkages of words, which makes speech sound more natural.
I also learned about the Phonemic Alphabet chart, which is a universal chart that describes how English-speakers pronounce words. The many sounds we make are dependent on places of articulation. The unit gives a brief anatomy lesson and description of where different sounds are pronounced engaged different parts of the body such as the glottis, larynx, and tongue. The manners of articulation are then covered, including the big four: plosives, fricatives, affricates, and nasals.
Pronunciation lessons can be taught using peer-to-peer activities, using your own mouth as an example, providing visuals of how the sound is produced, using phonemes, and even tongue twisters.
