SUMMARY

Chapter 13 Phonology: the sound of English

1 Pronunciation ideas.
These ideas will be useful to teach pronunciation and they
dont require to use phonetics symbols to perform them.
Model new words in context (teachers speak and students
hear and repeat)
Modelling intonation (teacher use real-life sentences.
Recognize the feeling (to read with intonation simulating
feelings)
Use dialogues (to read and to do some task at the same
time)
Chants (poems or dialogs for reciting aloud)
Shadow reading (teachers read out loud and students read
aloud)
Voice settings (to speak like a native speaker)

2 Which pronunciation?
The

received

pronunciation

is

kind

of

official

pronunciation.
Starting points for pronunciation:
Students need to learn the pronunciation that they in the
context where they probably will need to use the language.
Teachers should teach the pronunciation that they speak.

3 Sounds
Phonemes (individual sounds). According to the book text,
they can be:
Vowels
Consonants and
Diphthongs
Particular problems arise when:
English has two phonemes for a sound that seems, to an
untrained ear, to be a single sound.

English

has

phoneme

that

does

not

exist

in

the

students' own language.

The following simple games are helpful in familiarizing
student with phonemic symbols.
Phoneme bingo
Anagrams
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
Tongue

twisters, to

work on

particular sounds

or to

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

Train

learners

in

using

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

students pronounce something wrong.

correct

sounds

when

 Try a phonemic crossword.

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
Word stress is important because when it is wrong 3 words
sound very strange or even incomprehensible. 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.
Changes in prominence make substantial differences to
meaning.

6 Connected speech

Weak forms
These are the unstressed words. They mark out a rhythm on
the sentence.

The schwa
Its the most common weak form vowel sound (and thus the
most common sound. Some ideas to practice the schwa could
be:
De-schwaed texts
Stress and unstress
Count the words
Learn a limerick

What do I actually say?

There are many differences between the pronunciation of
separated words (citation form) and the pronunciation of
words joined in a sentence.

Analysing connected speech

Elision: sounds get dropped.
Assimilation: sounds get changed.

Intonation
1. Wh-questions (fall intonation)
2. Yes-no questions (rise intonation)
3. Orders (fall intonation).

REFLECTION
This week, I learned many aspects regarding how to
teach a correct pronunciation of English speeches.

Not

only

the

that,

but

could

recall

how

important

is

intonation and some changes that words suffer when they go

linked in a sentence.
About

the

resources

saw,

can

mention

the

phonemic crossword, the columns of stress patterns, the

videos (I am sure they were more but I didnt saw them).
Although,

think

students

will

learn

the

correct

pronunciation by listening and speaking, I consider visual

techniques are important too.
In conclusion, these classes have been useful for my
training as a future English teacher.