TEFL Hawthorn Pennsylvania

Phonology is the study of languages and is very useful when studying languages for the obvious reason that it allows not only the study of how a language works, but how it came about which can be very useful especially when languages are similar, much like the Latin based languages. It can be described is the classification of sounds that make up a language Phonetics is the study of the sounds of human speech, mostly concerning the production, auditory perceptions and acoustic properties. This means that phonetics has to do with the basics of human speech and the sounds we can make. The phonetic alphabet is different from the regular english alphabet in that it has more letters and this greater number more adequately represents the necessary sounds that the english language user must make to effectively use the language. The phonetic alphabet includes 44 different letters which is 18 more than the Standard english alphabet of 26. These extra letters cover the sounds that cannot be said to be included in the phonetic alphabet. This alphabet is also useful when considering the english language when it is written as it is spoken, with many letters added, missing or changed upon saying a sentence. The phonetic alphabet, whilst confusing if used by a native english speaker can be useful to those learning as they can learn exactly what should be said. Otherwise they may be reading incorrect words that sound alike but mean completely different things, like ‘thorough' and ‘through' or ‘heard' and beard' which look like they sound alike but are actually quite different. In Phonetics, letters that make up the alphabet can be described as vowels or consonants. The difference between vowels and consonants are that vowels are pronounced with an open vocal track whilst consonants are completed with a full or partially closed track. This means that all languages have vowel and consonant sounds as these are what the languages are divided into. Phonology can be divided most easily into areas such as stress, intonation and rhythm. If these are not present a person's language then the conversation is usually stilted and harder to understand. It is much like a sentence without grammar, where the usual clues that are picked up, like tone of voice or the hints that the person is finished speaking, are missing, it is hard to understand what the person was trying to get across. If they were asking a question or waiting for a reaction and this is missing then the other person in the conversation will likely be slow to answer and less likely to understand what it was that the person was really trying to say. Intonation, or the variation of volume and pitch in a sentence is used to indicate questions, agreeing, disagreeing or confirming and also in the expression of emotions. Stress is used with individual words. It helps people who are listening focus on what was really important in a sentence where a lot of words might have been said, and the correct context is necessary to make sense of it. Stress helps the person know what or who the object and subject of a sentence are. Phonetics and phonology are important to the english language learner as they help define what people say, by breaking up how they say it and how the sounds of words are supposed to be heard. Without this often neglected part of learning the english language speaker will, not matter how much they understand the grammatical constructs of sentences will still be stilted and awkward in conversation and therefore hard to listen to and understand. Teaching people the correct order to say things in can be a lot easier than teaching them how to say it, with stress and intonation. The best way that a person can pick these skills up naturally is that they have a lot of practice in using the language and so start to speak more fluidly and stop thinking about what they are saying so much so that can start to think about how they are saying it.