Chapter 13 Phonology: the sound of English

1 Pronunciation ideas

Model new words in context

Modelling intonation

Recognise the feeling

Use dialogues

Chants

Shadow reading

Voice settings


2 Which pronunciation?


Starting points for pronunciation




3 Sounds


Phonemes


Vowels


Consonants


Phonemic chart






Particular problems arise when:

English has two phonemes for a sound that seems, to an untrained
ear, to be a
single sound. A common example of this is the distinction between /i/
and /ii/
(as in hip vs. heap), which sound the same to some students;

English has a phoneme that does not exist in the students' own
language.


Phoneme bingo: Hand out bingo cards with phonemes instead of
numbers;
call out sounds rather than numbers (Resource 23 in Appendix 2).

Anagrams: Get students to work out anagrams of words using phonemes
rather than normal alphabetic letters, e.g. /kbu/ (= book) .

Category words:

And here are some general ideas for working with phonemes:

Integrate phonemic work into all your teaching of grammar and lexis.
Always
work on helping the students to achieve good pronunciation, and
encourage
them to make a record of the phonemic transcription as well as the
spelling of
new items.

Observation of mechanics: let students watch how you and they make
particular sounds.

Ear-training: get students to listen to and distinguish words which
have sounds
that seem to them very similar (e.g. hat vs. hut\ thin vs. tin\
examples of this
kind are known as minimal pairs).

Tongue twisters, to work on particular sounds or to contrast sounds
(e.g. Three thin trees and three tall trees).

Transliteration: get students to write out a word or sentence in
phonemic
script. Jokes seem to work well.

Train learners in using a dictionary to find pronunciation as well
as spelling.

Keep a phonemic chart on the wall of your classroom. Focus briefly
on one
phoneme each lesson.

Tap out words on the chart and ask students to say the words.

Use the chart for pointing out correct sounds when students
pronounce
something wrong.

Try a phonemic crossword like the one in Task 1 73.

4 Word stress

Stress and its opposite - unstress - are very important aspects of
English
pronunciation. Getting the stress wrong can seriously damage your
chances of
being understood.


The unstressed syllables become weaker, i.e. shorter^ spoken more
quickly and
with less well-defined (or even altered sounds), e.g. /wn't3:/,
/d^QS'tiis/.


Word stress is important because when it is wrong 3 words sound very
strange or
even incomprehensible. Would anyone understand you saying secretary?
Sometimes wrong stress changes one word into another; desert-dessert.



5 Prominence

Although individual words have their own stress, stress is also an
important
feature of sentences, when it is known as prominence or, less
accurately,
sentence stress. Rather than considering sentences, we analyse
utterances in
terms of tone units, i.e. sections of speech with one main stress. The
main stress
is known as the tonic syllable (or nucleus) ; there may also be one or
more
secondary stresses. Changes in prominence make substantial differences
to
meaning.




6 Connected speech


Weak forms

The schwa

The most common weak form vowel sound (and thus the most common sound

De-schwaed texts


Stress and unstress

Count the words


Learn a limerick


What do I actually say?


Analysing connected speech


Intonation


Vowels


Diphthongs


Consonants