APPLIED LINGUISTICS for BA Students in English
PRONUNCIATION
The areas of pronunciation
Individual sounds
Students of English have great difficulty hearing pronunciation features which we want them to reproduce. Speakers of different first languages have problems with different sounds, for example, they cannot distinguish between two sounds or they do not have certain sounds in their mother tongue e.g. [D] and [q]. Students are not familiar with sounds like [W], [E], [i], [p] and [q].
There are two ways of dealing with this problem: we can show students how sounds are made through demonstration, diagrams or explanation. The other way of presenting its pronunciation is to draw the sounds to their attention every time they appear on a cassette or in the conversation. This is the way how we can train the students’ ears. Teachers can use the minimal pair system through which students can recognize the difference between two similar sounds.
Contrasting two sounds which are very similar and often confused is a popular way of getting students to concentrate on specific aspects of pronunciation. This activity can be carried out by giving examples, both taken from English or one word taken from English and the other one taken from Hungarian.
a. vowels
[k], [Id] – compare Br. ‘film’ and Hun. ‘film’.
[E], [i] – ‘bed’ and ‘bad’
[s], [j], [hd] – ‘cut’, ‘cot’, ‘cart’
[jd], [em] – ‘law’, ‘low’
b. consonants
[p], [S] – ‘think’, ‘sink’
[q], [D] – ‘this’, ‘dis-’
[W], [V] – ‘west’, ‘vest’
[R] – Hun. ‘park’, Br. ‘park’
[n], [N] – ‘sing’, ‘sin’
[P], [T], [D] – Hun. ‘póló’ and Br. ‘polo’
It is possible to work on sounds of English without using any phonetic symbols. For many students – by problems of sound and spelling correspondence – it may make sense to be aware of the different phonemes, and the clearest way of promoting this awareness is to introduce the various symbols. There are other reasons for using phonetic symbols too. Dictionaries give the pronunciation of words in phonetic symbols. Students are usually only asked to recognize rather than produce the different symbols and these symbols are introduced gradually rather than all at once. So, according to most experts on methodology, the knowledge of phonetic symbols is of benefit to students. Teachers are expected to present phonetic symbols simultaneously with presenting the meaning of the new word. So as to identify these symbols, students are expected to listen to cassette recordings and they are expected to practice pronunciation in choral repetition first and then individually.
