Pronunciation and Phonology in the EFL Classroom - Issues with the International Phonetic Alphabet
There are two issues that need to be stressed when working with the international phonemic alphabet. First is the fact that we are no longer concerned with how a word is traditionally spelled. Additionally we need to stress that we are only concerned with the sounds needed to correctly produce a word. So rather than numerous spellings, which can often be pronounced in different ways, we have one symbol representing one sound. Once we can isolate a sound, rather than juggling various spellings, we can work with our students on how to say that sound. Doing that successfully is related to manner and place of articulation, which will be covered shortly. To get a better understanding of the phonemic alphabet, let's take a look at our chart. In the bottom half of our chart we have our consonant sounds. Each symbol represents one sound whereas in the Roman alphabet one consonant letter could produce a few different sounds, such as in the case with a C. It can be a hard C as in cake or it can be a soft C as in nice. With the phonemic alphabet, we alleviate that confusion again with one phoneme representing one sound. We've gotten rid of the C and replaced it simply with a ?k? sound as a cake or a ?s? sound as in nice. Most of the consonant sounds are represented by letters, which coincide with the Roman alphabet; however, we do have eight symbols which can confuse students when they're just getting this introduced to them. First, we have this symbol, which represents a ?ch? sound typically spelt with a CH. Next to that we have this symbol which represents the G sound. Moving further down we have our TH sounds. One sound would be as in think; another sound would be as in that. Moving over we have this symbol, which represents the SH sound Shh and this symbol which represents the sound as in measure. Here we have the ng symbol which represents the ?ng? sound as in song and lastly we have this symbol, which looks like it would represent the J sound but it doesn't it represents the Y sound as in ?y?.
Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next.
but it is not too different from present tens.
Irregular verbs are very difficult to remember for student.
because there are no rules to help students know which are irregular and how they are forme.
So we have to let them remember mechanicall.
Different classes activities can be used to practice, like card games,interview roleplay,discussing past holiday.
They are all pretty useful and interestin.
To learn past tense well, we have to remember the different past forms including affirmative, negative and question for.
For the past continuous tense, giving some forms of time reference are necessar.
The past tense is a grammatical tense whose principal function is to place an action or situation in past tim.
In languages which have a past tense, it thus provides a grammatical means of indicating that the event being referred to took place in the pas.
Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs sang, went and wa.
In some languages, the grammatical expression of past tense is combined with the expression of other categories such as mood and aspec.
Thus a language may have several types of past tense for.
Some languages that grammaticalise for past tense do so by inflecting the verb, while others do so periphrastically using auxiliary verbs, also known as \"verbal operators\" (an Not all languages grammaticalise verbs for past tense ? Mandarin Chinese, for example, mainly uses lexical means (words like \"yesterday\" or \"last week\") to indicate that something took place in the past, although use can also be made of the tense/aspect markers le and gu.
The \"past time\" to which the past tense refers generally means the past relative to the moment of speaking, although in contexts where relative tense is employed (as in some instances of indirect speech) it may mean the past relative to some other time being under discussio.
[1] A language's past tense may also have other uses besides referring to past time; for example, in English and certain other languages, the past tense is sometimes used in referring to hypothetical situations, such as in condition clauses like If you loved me.
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, where the past tense loved is used even though there may be no connection with past tim.
