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Teaching pronunciation is an important aspect of English language acquisition as it?s often difficult for students. Phonology is the study, science, analysis, and classification of the physical properties of sounds. These deal with stress, rhythm, and intonation. Intonation is the variation in volume and pitch in a whole sentence where as stress is concerned with individual words. Intonation carries the message in a sentence, especially in questioning, agreeing/disagreeing, or confirming statements. In a statement, the pattern of intonation is rise/fall. To show surprise or disagreement, the pattern is fall/rise. When the speaker doesn?t have much to say, the intonation is flat. Some techniques for teaching intonation are with nonsense words, by gesture, humming/singing, or drawing arrows on the board to indicate the direction of intonation. Two rules about word stress are: one word has only one stress, and we can only stress syllables. Most 2-syllable nouns and adjectives have stress on the first syllable. Most 2-syllable verbs have stress on the last syllable. Words ending in -ic, -sion, and -tion have stress on the penultimate syllable. Words ending in -cy, -ty, -phy, and -gy, -ive, and -al have stress on the third syllable from the end. For compound nouns, the stress is on the first part. For compound adjectives and verbs, the stress is on the second part. In normal speech that are more syllables without stress. Auxiliary verbs, articles, pronouns, and prepositions are normally unstressed. Techniques for indicating stress are: contrastive stress, by gesture, choral work, and using stress marks on the board. There are four major ways that sounds join together in English: linking, sound dropping, sound changing, and extra lettering. The closer that students are able to link words together, the more natural their speech will sound. Another challenge students might face is phonology, when words have different sounds even with similar individual or group of letters. The most important skill when using the phonemic alphabet is to forget about the way a word is spelled and focus on the sound. Then find the symbol that produces each individual sound and put them together to form the phonetic spelling. Organs or areas involved in speech include: the tongue, larynx, glottis, alveolar ridge, hard palate, and soft palate. Each place of articulation is connected to a different organ or area. Some ways to teach individual sounds are through peer dictation, over-emphasizing, with visuals, using symbols, or with tongue twisters. Teaching pronunciation can be done throughout the whole lesson, in certain points during the lesson, or when required. I learned that teaching pronunciation may be the most difficult for native English speakers as we've never really had to think about the way we talk or say certain words. It's helpful to be visual and very clear when breaking down words or sounds for students to understand the natural sound.
