1. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute OBJECTIVES You will understand: 1. The scope of the field of phonology; 2. The relevance of phonology to language teaching. You will be able to: 1. Integrate the principles of phonology into your teaching of pronunciation

2. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute Phonology is the study and description of the distinctive sound units of a language and their relationship with one another. In some countries, phonology is also known as phonemics. Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. Human language exhibits a wide variety, but finite number, of sounds called phones, segments or speech sounds. Phonetics includes:  physiological phonetics (the anatomical, neurological and physiological basis of speech production)  articulatory phonetics (the actions and movements of the speech organs to produce speech)  acoustic phonetics (the sound waves that transmit speech)  auditory phonetics (how the ears receive speech)  perceptual phonetics (how the brain processes speech information) Pronunciation is how a sound or sounds are produced and is thus the practical language classroom application of the information obtained from phonology and phonetics.

3. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute THE INTERNATIONAL PHONEMIC ALPHABET The International Phonemic Alphabet (also known as the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA) refers to a set of symbols used to represent the sounds of a language. There is a one-to- one relationship between each sound and the corresponding symbol in the IPA. Many symbols used to represent consonant sounds are familiar because they come from the Roman alphabet. Phonemic symbols are enclosed in brackets / / or [ ] to indicate that the transcription is phonemic and not representational of the spelling of a language.

4. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute THE INTERNATIONAL PHONEMIC ALPHABET

5. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute The Role of the IPA The IPA is important when discussing the English language because English does not have simple sound-symbol correspondence: one letter of the English alphabet does not represent one symbol from the IPA. In fact, one letter does not represent the same sound all of the time, nor is a specific sound always represented by only one letter in the alphabet. This discrepancy makes spelling and pronunciation difficult for English language students. A working knowledge of IPA, generated through the work of phonologists, may then help students with their pronunciation and spelling.

6. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute DETERMINING THE SOUNDS OF A LANGUAGE How did phonologists decide which sounds belong to the English IPA and which don’t? They have to complete what is called a ‘sound inventory’ or a ‘phoneme inventory’. To do this, phonologists look at a set of sound data from a language, usually in the form of transcriptions into phonetic symbols. They then determine which symbols represent phonemes, units of sound with meaning, and sounds with no meaning.

7. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute ALLOPHONES An allophone is a variation on a phoneme that is not distinct enough to be a phoneme on its own. For example, the phoneme /t/ is pronounced two different ways in the words ‘today’ and ‘bottle’. However the sounds are not considered to be separate phonemes but are considered to fall within the range of sound covered by the phoneme /t/. They are therefore allophones. Consider the aspirated and unaspirated sounds /p/, /t/ and /k/ in the words ‘pin’, ‘tin’ and ‘kin’ versus ‘spin’, ‘stink’, and ‘skin’. You should notice that there is no longer a short burst of air after the starting consonants in this second set of words; these sounds are unaspirated. Both the aspirated and unaspirated versions of the phonemes are therefore allophones.

8. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute THE ROLE OF PHONOLOGY IN LANGUAGE TEACHING Why do English language teachers need to know about phonemes, allophones, and the phonemic alphabet?

9. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute  Many of your students will know this information and will ask you about it. You will lose face with them if you are not conversant in the topic.  Knowledge of phonology will help you more deeply understand the sound characteristics and features of the language you are teaching. This assists in specific identification and explanation of student errors with sound production.

10. ACE TESOL Diploma Program – London Language Institute Complete Task Journal questions 1 and 3 in class. Task Journal question 2 can be submitted via email to paula@llinstitute.com (preferred) or printed and handed in. paula@llinstitute.com