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This unit talked about pronuncation and phonology. Within pronuncation there are two things to consider, intonation and stress. Intonation is the variation in volume and pitch in a whole sentence and includes patterns of rise-fall - for when you have completed what you're saying, fall-rise - to indicate surprise or disagreement, and flat - when the speaker doesn't have much to say. Stress is the variation of volume and pitch with individual words within a sentence to show emphasis. It also includes types of sound joining and linked speech, which shows the way native speakers speak the language and may sound different from the way it's spelled, It's important to teach these ideas as a student's pronuncation can affect the meaning of what they're saying and what they understand. The phonology part of this unit discussed in large part the used of the Phonemic Alphabet. I have never heard of or used a phonemic alphabet before so this was all new to me and I learned a great deal from this section. Since many words in English are not spelled phonetically, nor do they follow similar rules or patterns, the phonemic alphabet would be a good way to help students learn how to pronounce words in English. The chart has denoted one symbol for one sound, therefore you don't focus on the way the word is spelled but on how it sounds -- you find the symbol that produces that sound to form phonetic spelling. I did find this somewhat challenging, as it's almost like learning a new alphabet, but I can the benefits for someone who is just learning English or struggling with pronuncation, especially for those whose native language doesn't use the Roman alphabet.
