TEACHING PRONUNCIATION
Lecture One
General Questions
 What do you expect to learn in this course?
 What dose pronunciation mean?
 How do you judge whether you have a good pronunciation or not?
 How many letters do we have in English?
 How many sounds?
E.g. “cat” , “knife”
 let's see the word “Cat”
_ It consists of [k] represented by the letter c, the vowel [æ] represented by a and
the final [t]
_ It doesn’t depend on spelling, so it depends on sound
 Linguistics:
 It is the scientific study of human natural speech.
 Principals components of linguistics:
 Morphology:
 The study of word formation in a language.
 Semantics:
 The study of word and sentence meaning in a language.
 Syntax:
 The study of sentence structure in a language.
 Phonology:
 The study of sound pattern and structure I a language.
 Phonetics:
 The study of sound s made in the production of human speech
 English Phonetics
Phonetics is the study of sound made in the production of human speech. It deals
with the production of the sounds, the physical properties of the sounds
 Phonetics: The Sounds of Language
_ The systematic study of human speech sounds
_How they are produced
_How they are characterized
Phonetics and Phonology
 Phonetics and phonology are two branches of linguistics that deal primarily
with the structure of human language sounds. Phonetics focuses on the
physical manifestations of speech sounds and on theories of speech
production and perception. Phonology is concerned with the systems of rules
(or constraints) that determine how the sounds of a language combine and
influence one another.
 As phonetics and phonology both deal with sounds, and as English spelling
and English pronunciation are two very different things, it is important that
you keep in mind that we are not interested in letters here, but in sounds. In
other words, phonetics is about sounds of language, phonology about sound
systems of language
The importance of phonetics
 Phonetics and phonology are worth studying for several reasons,
that the study of the phonetics of a foreign language gives us a
much better ability both to hear and to correct mistakes that we
make, and also to teach pronunciation of the foreign language (in
this case English) to others.
Branches of Phonetics
 Principal branches of phonetics:
1.Articulatory phonetics:
Focuses on the human vocal apparatus and describes sounds in terms of
their articulation in the vocal tract.
2.Acoustic Phonetics:
Uses the tools of physics to study the nature of sound waves produced
in human language.
3. Auditory phonetics:
Studies the perception of sound by the brain through the human ear.
Orthography and Sounds
 Alphabetic spelling represents the pronunciation of words.
However, the sounds of the words in a language are
unsystematically represented by orthography (Spelling).
 Even though alphabetic spelling is meant to represent the
pronunciation of words, it is not always reliable in figuring out
how a word is pronounced for the following reasons:
 Different letters may represent the same sound:
e.g. to - too - two
 A single letter may represent different sounds:
e.g. dame dad father call village many.
 A combination of letters may represent a single
sound:
e.g. shoot - character - physics - rough
 Some letters have no sound at all in certain
words:
_ knife - resign – lamb – talk
To sum up,
The English language is not phonetic. Words are not spelled as they are
pronounced.
There is no one to one correspondence between the letters and the
sounds.