Teach English in Ningdong Zhen - Yinchuan Shi

This unit talked about the importance of teaching phonology both for the teacher and the students. We also tackled the areas of stress, rhythm, and intonation. It showed how phonetic alphabet helps the students to come to an understanding of the pronunciation of English. Intonation is the variation in volume and pitch in a whole sentence. We have 3 patterns of intonation : first the normal pattern called as the rise\fall intonation, second the fall/rise intonation, and lastly the flat intonation. Let’s now talk about the stress. Stress is the strong part or emphasizes word in a sentence. There are two basic rules about word stress: 1.)One word has only one stress. There can be a secondary stress in some words but is only used in longer words. 2.) We can only stress syllables. We also have to bare in mind that it is very important to feel the music of the language and to add the stress naturally. And now let’s take a look how sounds are joined together. We can do it in four major ways. These are: linking, sound dropping, sound changing, and extra lettering. Moving on to the phonemic alphabet, we must consider that one of the major difficulties of the students is how a word should be pronounced. One of the most important skills, when using the phonemic alphabet,is to forget about the way a word is traditionally written/spelt and focus only on the sounds you make when saying a particular word. A dictionary and studying the different phonemic symbols helps us to pronounce a word correctly. In this unit we also learned the speech organs, the place of articulation such as velar,palatal, palatal-alveolar, alveolar, dental, Albion’s-dental, bilabial and glottal. The difference between voiced and unvoiced letters are called Manner of articulation. The following are the six manners of articulation: affricative, plosives,approximately, nasal, lateral, and fricative.