Teach English in ShAgou Zhen - Taizhou Shi

Phonetics/Phonology Why phonetics vs phonology is important to study for teachers and students? A very communal definition, ‘phonetics is a study that relates to sounds of speech’. It helps in decoding words and pronouncing them correctly. Whereas, phonology treaties with sound patterns, stress and intonation in a specific language and it also inspects the sounds that are not tangled to a certain language only. Phonetics brought new visions to the teaching of pronunciation. Broughton et. al. (1980: 50) explained, ‘the study of the physical properties of sounds and their place and manner of articulation in the vocal tract’. Phonetics formulae as a tool of vital importance that use in the teaching of pronunciation such as any sound and speech description of the English categorized into consonants and vowels. Vowels help to explain the position of the tongue and lip rounding whereas consonants describe the movement of the mouth while speaking. It also indicates the voice will use or not. These are most important to teach pronunciation particularly to teach foreign languages. It enables the teachers to study the modifications between the sounds of source and target languages as well as clarify this difference to learners. It also facilitates and allows the learners to understand better and speak the language they are learning. Phonology is about phonemes like the distinctive sound of a language and its relationship to one another. This is concerned with how phonemes apply in different phonological systems for example study of different sounds and the way they come together to form speech and words such as the contrast of the sounds of the two ‘p’ sounds in ‘pop-up’. Phonology important for teachers: Hence, it is essential for English teachers to aware of the phonetics as phonology is about learning of the sound. It will help English teachers to have a strong grasp on intonation, accent, dialect in the English language as well as it will enable the teacher to have better pronunciation. How do teach phonology? I found a few good techniques to teach phonology as an English Language teacher: • Awareness about good phonological can be initiated with students by picking up sounds, syllables, and rhymes in the words they hear. • Rhyming can be focused • Connecting sounds • Break the word sounds • Follow the beat and transmit a tune etc. Phonology is learning the sounds of a language. When spoken, it sounds like an unbroken string of sounds, but actually, it is consisting of many smaller sound units that can call phonemes. These small pieces of sound are given the name of ‘building blocks of words.’ Literacy development requires phonemic awareness as a vital process where students learn to hear and break down words into the single sounds, blend sounds, and operate sounds to build up new words. However, the important role of phonetics and phonology cannot be underestimated in the teaching of language pronunciation. Especially when it moves toward English, as we know half of billion people’s first language is English and use as the second language of a billion people. So understanding about phonetics conveys further weight. It is difficult to differentiate all the ranges of English as many speakers are living around the world. This is the main cause that phonetics is considered important for ESL learners who need to be cautious about the variation of English they use. Learning phonetic and phonology might avoid miscommunication concerning teachers and students or teacher to teacher because learning these two elements will able to distinguish how to pronounce something correctly, whether it is long or short. This will may help us to communicate more meritoriously and evade any miscommunication. Reference: http://saundz.com/what-is-phonetics-and-why-does-it-matter/