Teaching Listening and Speaking through Phonology

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.

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.

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.

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.

Traditional listening lessons are based around the three stages:

pre-listening

while-listening

post-listening

Tasks that help students to identify phonological features:

count the words in the sentence they hear

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

read along with the recording

Symbols are a very useful aid to teaching and learning.

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.

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