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Unit 13 focused on skilled pronounciation teaching. Although difficult to standardize, general guidelines can be used for English pronounciation such as stress, rhythm, intonation, and International Phonetic Alphabet. These can be very helpful for teachers and students to grasp the pronounciation of English. Intonation deals with the volume and pitch in a sentence and carries the message. Stress is more focused on individual words. Some techniques for teaching intonation are, using nonsense words, gestures, humming and writing on the board. A word can only have one stress and only syllables can be stressed. Rules were given on when to stress first syllables, last syllables, penultimate, ante-penultimate syllables and compound words. There were also unstressed syllables. Techniques for teaching stress, included contrastive stress,gestures, choral work and using the board. We learnt the major ways sounds join together by linking, sound dropping, sound changing and extra lettering. The phonemic alphabet is made up of symbols that assist in the accurate pronounciation of words. The phonetic spelling is all about the way words sound rather than how they are spelt. A phonemic alphabet chart was given. We looked at the speech organs, the tongue, larynx, glottis and other areas in the mouth, alveolar ridge, hard palate, and the soft palate. These are the physical location from which words are produced or places of articulation, palatial, palatial alveolar, alveolar, dental, labio-dental, bilabial and glottal. We learnt the manner of articulation, which is the difference in the way the sounds are formed. These are plosives, fricative, nasal, lateral, affricate and approximant. A chart was given showing the manner and place of articulation for consonants. Teaching techniques for the pronounciation of individual sounds were also given.
