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lunes, 20 de abril de 2015

UNIT 3 PHONOLOGY


UNIT 3 PHONOLOGY





Phonology is the study of sounds features used in a language by humans to communicate. Focusing on the English language we have phonemes, word stress, sentence stress and intonation.
However, a phoneme is the smallest unit of sounds which makes a difference to meaning in a language. The phonemes of English are often shown in a phonemic chart which is kind of complicated to memorize all its elements but very useful at the moment of recognize the sounds. This chart includes a group of vowels sounds which are made with the mouth partly open and where the air is not stopped by the tongue, lips or teeth, there also diphthongs  which is the movement from one vowel sound to another like for example in the word take /teik/ . Also this chart contains consonants that the flow of air is partly blocked by the tongue lips or teeth when we make these sounds. At this point I have to mention that there are two kinds of consonants: voiced sounds which are spoken using the vibration of our voice such as /b//d//g/ and unvoiced sounds which are spoken without using our voice such as/p//t//k/.
 In conclusion, “Language appears to be much more complex than is generally assumed and this complexityis important for theories of speech production and comprehension” (John A. Goldsmith, 2011) so phonology is one of the most important subjects because it helps speakers to make sounds correctly and obviously to have a good pronunciation, which is why I would like to ask my students to work a lot of phonemic transcriptions in order to let them learn the phonemic chart.

 (Giegerich, 1992)


location of vowel





video: how to teach phonology
Bibliography:
Giegerich, H. J. (1992). English Phonology: An Introduction. United Kingdom.
John A. Goldsmith, J. R. (2011). The Handbook of Phonological Theory. New York.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM5OgB7ycfg

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