Teach English in Belleterre - TEFL Courses

Phonology and Phonetics (4) The way in which we pronounce words is an interesting topic for any language and in english there are so many factors which students may not notice and are certainly constructive to our language. It seems to be that there are no particular rights and wrongs of how much emphasis to put on pronunciation in lessons, and a teacher should always be ready to accept that foreigners pronunciation of our language may not be completely perfect, but it's something which students need to practise over and over in order to speak as correctly as they can. Another important aspect teachers should be aware of and ready to adapt to is the fact that different nationalities will have different pronunciation problems. I am learning some Russian at the moment and when the lady speaks in english she finds the 'th' sound fairly easy (eg. tooth), yet the 'er' more difficult (eg. finger); however a japanese friend I have finds these sounds easier but struggles with the 'l' sound in english, for example, changing it to a 'r' sound. A teacher will come across this more if they are working with multilingual classes rather than monolingual and to teach the manner of articulation is necessary for learners to form the pronunciation well. 'Th' in thumb and 'th' in this are both fricative sounds however a student will need to understand that they are formed slightly differently where one sound is softer than the other; when saying this the articulation is softer and although the tongue protrudes for this and thumb, it rests differently for this, on the teeth and on the lips for thumb. Looking into the intonation and stress of phonology we see that intonation carries the meaning to the context within the language. Being able to translate through emotion is something which comes through understanding language through natural conversation in my own experience of learning languages. In one respect, you can imagine how a conversation is going by listening to the pitch range of the speakers, however I've discovered that when I thought my greek/english boyfriend was shouting at his mum, he was actually saying that he was happy for her about something! Thus, really, we cannot know the message within speech unless we have learned how to intonate properly within that language. Using http://www.slideshare.net/satheesh985/study-of-english-stress-and-intonation-presentation I came to realise that we always apply stress to the information supplied when posing wh- questions, such as who, what where etc. We need this to stand out as it is new material for the speakers; when is your BIRTHDAY? My birthday is the 20th of OCTOBER: the speaker responding doesn't need to stress birthday again as the context is already there through the question put forward, but the date in answer to the question is the new information being provided. As english isn't a language which uses stress through accented letters like various other languages, understanding the placement of sounds and how sounds change between similar words is an important aspect of phonology and contains rules to be learned. Eg. el bebé and el bebe in spanish mean baby (masculine noun) and he drinks/he's drinking; I can tell where to stress each word and the significance of each word from the accent or lack of. In english we have to determine stress based upon the make-up of words: 2 syllable adjectives = first syllable stress, words ending in tion/sion = penultimate syllable, 2 syllable nouns = first syllable etc. When a word can be used as a verb and a noun the stress is placed differently depending on the usage. Eg. skateboard, as a verb the word is stressed on the second syllable board, but as a noun it's stressed on the first, skate. Stress is also used to convey meaning within a context and sentences can change depending on which word the stress lands on; without the stress landing on the right word, the meaning of the entire sentence is lost/incorrect. An example of this is to say a sentence such as 'I tried to stop him, but I couldn't'. Stressing tried emphasises that the speaker did actually make an effort to do something and is asking for forgiveness for the failure, stressing stop states the actual action which the speaker used as opposed to another verb and stressing couldn't in conjunction with this shows that the opposite to the action stop happened instead. Stressing I shows that it was the speaker who tried and failed rather than another party, and stressing him conveys that the speaker is talking about a person who has already been given in the previous information. We can stress vowels but not consonants. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8305645/The-conTROversy-over-changing-pronunciations.html and information from the PDF correctly states that although we learn stressing words based on rules, sometimes other factors such as regional and international english accents come in to play and often words can change their stressed syllables based on this; “garage”, which Britons are more likely to pronounce as “garridge”, over “garaarge”, which is universal in the US. To conclude, students of the english language should study english to the fullest, not only with aspects such as grammar and vocabulary but also honing their productive and receptive skills to the maximum, and pronunciation is a huge part of this. Once students are building up fluid, accurate english they should be looking at the natural flow of the words; sound joining and linking words, so that their accent and speech sounds as native as possible.