Teaching Listening and Speaking through Phonology

More like this

Tai chi

by Marisol Olaya

Phonetics: study of perception and production of speech sounds

by Michaela Diaz

Our Purpose

by Colin Robertson

Peter and the Wolf

by limin chen

Teaching Listening and Speaking through Phonology

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

There are 44 for both British (BrE) and American English (AmE) with only slight differences between them.

The IPA shows how words are pronounced, it is much better than use the normal alphabet which might cause confusion about how the word is spelt.

Symbols are a very useful aid to teaching and learning.

Phonology is that branch of linguistics which studies the sound system of languages. It breaks down inti two elements from Greek, meaning "sound" and "study".

Areas of Phonology

Phonemes

Connected speech

Intonation

Word and sentence stress

Addressing phonology in listening and speaking classes

Tasks that help students to identify phonological features:

read along with the recording

mark the pauses, stress and intonation in a brief script accompanying the recording

count the words in the sentence they hear

Traditional listening lessons are based around the three stages:

post-listening

while-listening

pre-listening

Teaching communicatively means the teacher provides a set of activities that learners need to handle with. Listening and speaking stages during the class help students to make better sense of what they hear or pronounce.

Other phonological features

Intonation is important, we use pitch variation for many reasons: not only to show our attitude to what we're saying, or to the person we're talking to. Intonation conveys differences of expressive meaning (e.g., surprise, anger, wariness). In many languages, including English, intonation serves a grammatical function, distinguishing one type of phrase or sentence from another.

When a word has more than two syllables in English, one syllable will receive more importance than the others when it is pronounced. This is the syllable that receives the primary word stress. This means that, compared to the other ones, the vowel sound of that syllable will be slightly: louder, longer, at a higher pitch.

Phonology covers far more than the individual sounds of a language; English is musical and rhythmic, lots of attention is paid to the right syllable and emphasising the right words in sentences.