Ipa Linguistics

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences For the longest time, people have separated teaching English from linguistics, which tends to include all their subcategories. However, phonetics, in particular, plays an incredibly integral part of the teaching of the English language. Why is an understanding of phonetics important in aiding the teaching pronunciation, articulation, and intonation? Being able to demonstrate how one changes the shape of their mouth, or the placement of their tongue can be the difference between someone speaking correct English and sounding as close as possible to a native speaker. Without at least a basic knowledge of this concept, how can we as teachers properly explain and display the way our language sounds in comparison...  [Read more]

Elizaveta Pachina Alumni Experiences Many ESL teachers have never even heard of phonetics or phonology, yet they use these aspects of speech naturally when they speak. Phonetics and phonology are two areas of linguistics that study the sounds of language. Phonetics focuses on individual sounds, while phonology studies the features and combination of sounds (McMahon, 1-3). There are two reasons why ESL teachers need to know phonetics and phonology: first, it helps them to conceptualize English in a way that their students can understand; and second, it helps them to address their students’ difficult pronunciation problems. This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Victoria I. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily...  [Read more]