This unit is about phonology which is the study of the sound patterns used in a language to communicate. It includes phonemes, word stress, sentence stress and intonation. Furthermore, I learnt that a phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in speech. For example, the /m/ sound often written as /m/ is a phoneme. The phonemes are presented in a phonemic chart to represent each sound with a single symbol. These symbols are enclosed in brackets to show that the phonetic transcription (Dobrovolsky, & Katamba, 1997). It is divided into vowels, diphthongs and consonants where there are voiced and unvoiced sounds. On the other side, word stress is when we pronounce a syllable with more force and emphasis and sentence stress is used to show students which part of the sentence is the most important. Finally, I learnt that intonation is an important feature that encompasses the intonation of our voice to show meaning. The intonation describes the level (high or low) at which we speak (Harmer, 2008).
To summarize, it's useful for learners to practice in hearing and recognizing sound features. It means that in a teaching situation I would use some interactive activities where students will feel encouraged to improve their English skills. They can listen to music and radio programs to contrast the voiced and voiceless sounds.
Bibliography:
Dobrovolsky, M., & Katamba, F. (1997). Phonetics: The sounds of language. Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Addison Wesley Longman Limited, Essex.
Cambridge, UK
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