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In this unit we look at teaching pronunciation and phonology. Phonology is this study and classification of the physical attributes of sounds. Intonation is the first term that we come across in this unit. Intonation is widely considered to be the variation in volume and pitch throughout a sentence. Intonation usually carries the message that you are trying to portray in a sentence. This is really important in showing expressions or feelings. The most normal or most used pattern of intonation is the rise/fall intonation. The second type of common intonation is the fall/rise pattern. This pattern is used when surprised or when you would like to disagree. It can also be used to prompt someone to respond or confirm something. There is also flat intonations where usually the speaker might not want to talk or doesn't have much to say. Nonsense words can be used to help teach intonation. They can be used to help convey attitude. Gesturing is also a good way to do this. I can speak from personal experience when my friend was teaching me Chinese she would use gestures to teach me the proper intonation of words. Humming/singing and using the board can also be good was to do this. Stress was the next part that was talked about. One sentence can be interpreted in many ways all because of stress. There is a really good layout where they show how the meaning of a sentence changes depends on the word that is stressed and tells you that meaning. It is really convenient to see laid out this way. It is also explained that one word can have only one stress. The secondary stress can be on other words but it is not as large as the others. Whether than vowels or consonants having the stress it is always and only on the syllables. The stress chart that was provided is super useful to break down on how stresses work with different types of words. When normally speaking there are more words without stress than with it. The terms that are usually unstressed are auxiliary verbs, articles, as well as pronouns and prepositions. Gesturing can also be used to teach stress. Next was sound joining. There are four ways that sounds can be joined together in the English language: Linking, Sound Dropping, Sound Changing, and Extra Lettering. I liked the linked speech chart. Being a native English speaker you don't always notice what the way you speak might not sound like the way it should be written, such as using the word 'Doncha' instead of 'Don't you'. The next thing we see in this unit is the phonetic alphabet, which I personally thought was rather hard to understand at first. Word in English might be spelled differently then how they would be pronounced. Articulation is the formation of clear and distinct sounds in speech. It takes a lot of organs to properly create the sounds that would potentially create words. I think it is really cool this unit provides the place of articulation for sounds. Knowing were the sound comes from can be beneficial to helping with pronunciation. I will occasionally show the students I tutor where the sounds they are making are coming from so they can repeat properly. There is so much information about the way a sound should be created like: plosive, fricative, nasal, lateral, affricate, and approximant. There are different techniques that can be implemented to aid in the pronunciation of sounds such as, visuals(diagrams), using you own mouth to show students what it looks like, peer dictation, phonemes and tongue twisters.
