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This was a long unit on pronunciation and phonology. The unit was broken down into three major sections: intonation, stress, and phonology. The first section of the unit dealt with the pitch and volume of the entire sentence. The rising-falling pattern describes most sentences in English, including statements. A falling-rising pattern is used for questions or statement that the speaker is expecting a response too. A flat intonation throughout the sentence doesn't convey as much semantic meaning, but instead may indict the mood of the speaker or their willingness to engage in communication. There are a variety of techniques to teach intonation. Most of these methods involve visual cues so the student can \"see\" the intonation change. One technique for this would be drawing arrow diagrams along the sentence on the board. Another technique could be using your hands to indicate the rise and fall of intonation. The second section of the unit focused on stress. In addition to the intonations patterns covered so far, a word or words within a sentence can be stressed to alter the intended meaning and focus on a particular aspect of the meaning. Additionally, stress also occurs naturally to emphasize certain parts of a sentence. For example, the verb that carries the most semantic meaning is generally stressed, while less important words like modal verbs, articles and pronouns are naturally unstressed. The best way to teach this is by example. Taking one sentence and explaining how moving the stress around would change the meaning illustrates the point nicely. Stress also occurs within words, but this is more for pronunciation as opposed to adding meaning. The stress that is put on words follows some general patterns based on the flow of the spoken language. The patterns offer a good guideline, but should not be treated as the authority as there are many exceptions. In addition to stress on words, this section covers sound changes that occur within or between words. The cases of sounds changes are linking words, adding letters, dropping letters/sounds, and changing sounds. The final section of this chapter focused on phonetics and IPA. IPA is an alphabet designed to describe sounds that are made in speech. This gives us a universal method for transcribing the sounds of any language, dialect, or accent into a format that is independent of the language itself. In teaching the alphabet, the anatomical structures that allow human to produce sound were covered. The parts of the mouth/throat that are activated to make the noise describe the place of articulation, while the flow of air through these parts describes the manner of articulation. These two descriptors describe any sound humans make. Methods for teaching this include using your mouth as an example, drawing anatomical diagrams, and using tongue twister activities. If using your own mouth to dramatically exemplify a sound, it is important to repeat the word naturally immediately afterwards. The goal in this being to avoid drilling strange pronunciation into memory.
