Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Wangyuan Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Yinchuan Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Phonology, also known as phonemics, is the study of the particular sound units (phonemes) in languages. It can be compared to phonetics, which is the study of human speech in general, and includes the articulation and perception of sounds. Example Phonology aims to describe the sounds (phonemes) that are distinctive in a language. This can be done by identifying minimal pairs such as 'tin' and 'bin'. In the classroom Phonological areas looked at in language teaching include phonemes, intonation, stress, accent and features of connected speech such as elision, intrusion and catenation. Phonemes are the smallest units of sounds in a language. If a phoneme is changed, the word may change, e.g. change the l sound in 'lack' to a b and the word changes to 'back'. Example In English, the sound e in 'pet' and i in 'bit' are examples of vowel phonemes, the sounds j in 'judge' and sh in 'ship' are consonant phonemes. Diphthongs include the oy sound in 'boy' and the ay sound in 'bay'. In the classroom Phonemes are the basic building blocks of spoken language. Learners can be helped to discriminate phonemes through comparing 'minimal pairs'; pairs of words which differ only in one phoneme. Another approach is to integrate the teaching of pronunciation, dealing with aspects of pronunciation as they come up, rather than systematically.
