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In this Unit, I learned a lot about the difficulty of teaching pronunciation. Although it may seem impossible to standardize everything, because of the countless amounts of ways one expresses words, it is possible to lay very general guidelines. We just have to keep in mind to accept the students' intelligibility instead of perfection when it comes to their English pronunciation. I learned that phonology is \"the study, science, analysis, and classification of the physical properties of sound\" (pg. 3). This includes areas in intonation, stress and rhythm. Intonation can be said to be the variation in volume and pitch in a whole sentence, basically carrying the overall message. I found that normally, when you finish what you want to say, the intonation rises then falls. When you want the listener to respond or confirm, the intonation falls then rises. Stress, on the other hand, deals more with individual words and the speaker's motives/intentions. Depending on the type of message you want to relay, the corresponding \"strong part\" of the sentence is emphasized. I realized how powerful the phonetic alphabet can be. These sets of symbols, representing the way English speakers put sounds together to form words, help people no matter where they're from or what variety of English they speak. I learned about voiced and unvoiced consonants and how easily you can differentiate them but putting your hand over your throat. I had no idea that the vibrations made in your throat, the /b/ sound for example, means that it is voiced, and that the /p/ 'sound', causing no vibration in the vocal chords, means that it is an unvoiced consonant. The Unit also touched upon the different places of articulation, which I admit, I need to spend more time looking over because of its complexity and unfamiliarity.
