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Despite its immense importance, pronunciation is often neglected in teaching English, usually due to its complexity, teachers' lack of formal training or confidence in teaching it, or some combination. Nonetheless, pronunciation must be actively taught, especially in a language such as English that does not use a phonetic writing system. Phonology is the study of sound systems in the world's languages, as well as of their interactions. Every language has a set of several vowel and consonant phonemes that make up the core sounds of the language. In addition to these, there may be allophones of a single or multiple phonemes that occur when particular sounds appear in certain environments. Beyond the basic phonemes (segmental features), there are also suprasegmental prosodic features. In English, these include sentential (post-lexical) intonation and stress. Intonation is defined as the variations in pitch over a prosodic unit, such as a word or a phrase. Stress in English is a function of both pitch and amplitude, meaning that stressed syllables or words are produced more loudly and generally with a higher pitch in order to mark their salience. Stress in English is assigned both at the lexical and post-lexical levels: the former refers to syllable stress within a word, e.g. strawberry /?st??b??i/ (not that I am using Standard American English for my IPA transcriptions); the latter refers to word stress within a phrase or sentence, e.g. I wanted a STRAWBERRY [not a blueberry]. All of these phonological features and processes are important to understand and keep in mind when teaching students English, as without a clear understanding of how these function, students will not be able to acquire correct pronunciation. In order to teach individual sounds, it is often useful to draw diagrams of the mouth in order to show students where a particular sound is produced. For example, in order to teach the dental fricatives /?/ and /ð/, a teacher should draw a diagram that shows the tongue resting between the upper and lower teeth, while allowing air to pass through (that is, not producing a full closure that would yield a dental plosive). Another method, though somewhat more difficult for some sounds, is to use one's own mouth to demonstrate how and where to produce a particular sound. In order to practice sounds with the class, peer dictation and tongue twisters may be fun ways to get students to work on troublesome phonemes.
