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Though many times neglected in teaching because of lack of teacher´s confidence or the difficulties of certain features, pronunciation and phonology are important aspects of language learning.
Phonology studies the physical properties of sound. As teachers, during the lesson we should focus on the intonation, stress and the international phonetic alphabet.
Intonation refers to the variations in volume and pitch of the voice in a sentence and is what is going to help us understand the meaning. We have mainly two types: the rise-fall ones and the fall-rise one. There can also be a flat intonation. The first one is used to indicate that we finished talking. The second one is often used when expecting and answer or a confirmation or when the speaker has not finished talking yet. When teaching, we can use our hands to indicate the intonation direction, we can draw it on the board, we can utter nonsense words with different attitudes, etc.
When it comes to stress, we find that the stress word is the one that holds the emphasis of the sentence. Words can have only one stress, and the stress is always a syllable. Most of the words in a sentence lack stress, only the vital words, necessary to understand the meaning of the sentence, are stressed. There are different techniques to teach word’s stressing: by contrast, by gesture, writing them on the board and underlying the stress syllables, by chanting or singing the rhythms, etc.
As of the phonemic alphabet, since in English the pronunciation differs from the spelling, it is necessary to learn how to pronounce each letter or group of letters. Same letters or groups might sound different in different words, so the use of a phonemic alphabet becomes necessary to learn proper pronunciation. According to the speech organ involved in the sound, we can classify sounds in velar, glottal, palatal, alveolar, etc. There are also different manners of articulation, like plosive, affricate, nasal, fricative, etc. When teaching sounds and pronunciation, tongue twisters can become very useful as well as using your own mouth to emphasize certain parts of the word, teaching some of the phonemic symbols, etc.
As mentioned in this lesson, phonology is often neglected and it actually was when I studied English. I was never taught the phonemic alphabet or intonations or stresses, nor at school or private institute. Nonetheless, we would practice certain sounds when the teacher would notice some difficulty in pronunciation. This being said, I found that all the information in this unit was brand new for me. I feel it was a little bit difficult, especially identifying the stressed words in a sentence. I learned proper pronunciation from exposure to the language, so some things are quite hard to identify in a conscious way. I also feel that it would have been good to include the stress topic in the video.
