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This unit deals with pronunciation and phonology. I agree that pronunciation sometimes is the most neglected aspect of English language teaching. This unit contains general guidelines for English pronunciation which helps to grasp the basic concepts. It is mentioned that individual sounds and stress are difficult for students to perceive in isolation for the reason that the main interest of someone engaged in the act of communication is trying to understand the meaning of what is being said, but the students need to be made aware of the importance of accuracy and clarity of communication as well. It is the stated that the normal pattern of intonation in a statement is the rise/fall intonation which can be trained. The second common intonation pattern is the fall/rise pattern which indicates that the speaker needs some confirmation or that the speaker hasn't finished what he or she has to say. Teaching intonation in the classroom is not a simple matter, but there are certain techniques and activities that can help better understand it. The teacher can ask the students to utter nonsense sentences trying to convey a certain attitude such as indifference, boredom, annoyance, happiness, interest, etc. You can use humming and singing in order to make the stress and intonation sound more clear. The teacher should use gestures and the board marking the points that need to be emphasized as well as the directions of intonation. When teaching stress it is useful to remember that there are certain groups of words that are rarely stressed, such as axillary verbs, articles, pronouns and prepositions. There are some teaching techniques for indicating and teaching stress, such as contrastive stress, by gesture, clapping and clinking fingers, tapping on desk, choral work and chanting or singing typical rhythms of English and stress marks. It is also important to know that there are four major ways that sounds join together in English, like linking, sound dropping, sound changing and extra lettering. In this unit the question is raised of whether or not it is needed to teach your students the phonemic alphabet. I agree that it will certainly make things easier for the teacher and the students if they can develop a working knowledge of the system. The question of articulation is also raised in this unit dealing with the speech organs and place of articulation. All the consonant sounds are divided into velar, palatal, palatal-alveolar, alveolar, dental, labio-dental, bilabial and glottal. By manner of articulation we can divide the consonants into plosives, fricatives, nasals, lateral sounds, affricates and approximant consonants. A chart is also given in this unit which divides the sounds by manner and place of articulation which is quite visual and can be used when planning lessons. The most important thing is to be able to apply all this knowledge in your classroom and to use different teaching techniques in order to make it all clear to the students. There are different activities including peer dictation, over-emphasizing individual parts of a word, visuals and drawing diagrams of the mouth, tongue twisters. The teacher should remember that we are unlikely to ever get 100% perfection in our students' pronunciation, we must be realistic and sometimes be ready to simply accept intelligibility.
