UNIT 3 - PHONOLOGY

UNIT 3 –  PHONOLOGY

Phonology is an indispensable part of the process to learn to speak and there are several definitions of phonology, for instance, phonology is the study of the way that sounds are organized and used in language. It includes the sound features and rules that specify how the sound should interact between them. Besides,  Spratt, M., Pulverness, A., and Williams, M., (2011), says phonology is the study of sounds features to communicate meaning. Also, Szczegielniak (2011), mentioned that phonology is the sound patterns of language and it tells us how sounds can be combined in words and explain why certain phonetic characteristics are important to recognize a word.

The phoneme is one feature of phonology because a phoneme is a small unit of speech that makes one-word sound distinguish from the others. It is represented by phonetic symbols. A phoneme is represented only with one phonetic symbol. The symbols also are used to indicate word stress. Word stress is the emphasis of words especially in a syllable of the word, claimed Heredia (2018). Furthermore, sentence stress has primary and secondary stress. Primary stress is a relevant part of a sentence that gives meaning to it. Secondary stress is not as strong as primary stress. In phonetic we have another important feature that is intonation. According to Nodal, intonation is the modulation of tone and voice level of a person to transmit information.

To conclude, I have learned that phonology has several features but in my point of view, the most important are phonemes that are represented by phonetic symbols and intonation that refer to the changes in our level voice. Also, I understood what is a word stress and sentence stress.

Teachers can teach phonology in a class in many ways but I am going to give ways to teach it:

-         The teacher can teach phonology if he first teaches students the alphabet and the sounds corresponding to each letter so that students can learn to pronounce the words correctly.

-          The teacher can make a list of a group of specific words and ask his/ her students to pronounce the words and empathize with the stress of each word.

References

Heredia, R. (2018, 8 3). What is Word Stress? Retrieved from https://www.whatiselt.com/single-post/2018/08/03/What-is-Word-Stress

Nolan, F. (n.d.). Intonation. Retrieved from http://www.ling.cam.ac.uk/francis/FN_inton_prepub.pdf

Spratt, M., Pulverness, A., & Williams, M. (2011). The TKT Course Module 1, 2, 3 (Second). Cambidge: Cambridge University Press.

Szczegielniak, A. (2011). Introduction to Linguistic Theory. Retrieved from https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/adam/files/phonology.ppt.pdf