Pronunciation and Phonology in the EFL Classroom - Connected Speech
Connected speech is also an important element of phonology and it's involved in joining words together in an effect to make our speech more efficient. Some might say it's a product of being lazy but nonetheless it's what we all do and we want all of our non-native speakers to speak as naturally as possible, so we have to be aware of these things. Here are a few of the more common examples. We have linking, dropping, changing and extra lettering. An example of each would be with linking, we link our words together so that they almost in effect become one word. Instead of saying ?What do you want to do,? we typically will say ?Whatdoyou want to do?? Then, we can also have dropping. Rather than pronouncing each and every consonant, we can sometimes, especially in certain accents, drop some of the letters so in this word it should be ?butter? and this should be ?computer? but here it becomes ?bu?uh? and ?compu?uh?. Then, we can change our sounds as well. Again, I've used the same examples but what we're doing is we're changing the T sound to a D sound because our it's more efficient for vocal organs to move in that pattern. So rather than ?butter? it's ?budder? and rather than ?computer? it's ?compuder.? Then finally we have our extra lettering. This typically comes as we want to connect two vowel sounds with a bit of a consonant sound so instead of saying ?my eyes are green?, we sneak in just a hint of our Y sound so it becomes ?my yeyes? or ?my yeyes are green.? Then, we can also have, instead of ?drawing? it can become ?draring? just as ?washing? can sometimes become ?warshing?.
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