Building awareness and concern for pronunciation by Joanne Kenworthy - Teaching English Pronunciation FONETICA Y FONOLOGIA II - ALEXANDRA NAIR ZUÑIGA

Why should we "build" awareness and concern for pronunciation? Generally, when learning a new language, students, and also teachers, pay more attention to aspects as grammar vocabulary, meaning, spelling, etc. But certainly a correct pronunciation is essential for the lerner production and perception of English. We could have a perfect knowledge of the grammatical rules, but at the time of speaking, if we mispronunce words, the listener may have a great difficulty in undesrtanding what we want to say. Then, we'll not succedd in reaching the goal of communication.

According to Kenworthy it's more the teacher's responsibility to help develop the student's awareness about pronunciation matters because it's difficult for them to do this for themselves. So... How could we do that?

"Learning to pronounce a language is a very complex task and, (...) the learning process can be facilitated if the task is structured in some way and if the learner is aware of exactly what is involved." By structure the task, Kenworthy refers to divide the task into its components ordering them in some way. So English pronunciation's components are many and if we order them in terms of importance (from easy to difficult) would be something like this: words stress, rythm, variation in pitch, sounds etc. We have to show students the importance of learn and understand each of them so they would be able to know what to pay attention to and they could build upon this basic awareness.

Word stress English words have a stress pattern which is important to be aware of in order to make our speech understandable. All words consist in at least one syllable, when a word have two or more syllables then one of the syllbles will sound more prominent that the others, this is the stress syllable. For instance: MORNING TEACHER AFTERNOON

Rhythm Rhythm is close related to word stress and is characterized by the alternation of strong and weak syllables. The basis of English Rhythm is the stressed syllables, in a tone unit they tend to occur at equal intervals of time while the unstressed syllables are reduced. She took the train to Liverpool.

Sentence stress In spoken English in order to make our speech understandable we have to give more emphasis to the most important words, that is, put the stress on the words which carry the most information. If we change the stress, then it changes the meaning of what we want to say. For instance: He gave Mary a present.

Weak forms "Weak forms should be introduced after the basic points about word stress rhythm, and sentence stress have been convered." There are some categories of words that are generally weak in English. As pronouns, prepositions, verb to be, and others. But this weak form, also, depends on the context. She put her notebook on the table.

Intonation Intonation in speech is used to indicate attitudes and emotions of the speaker. Also to make a difference between a statement and a question or to indicate diferent types of questions. For instance: Why do you want to go to London ?

The sounds "People tend to hear the sound of a new language in terms of the sounds of their mother tongue." This is one of the most difficult and complex component to learn about pronunciation. Some English sounds are similar to Spanish sounds but some others are tottaly new to the students and they could result very difficult to learn because they doesn't exist in their language. So students tend to hear them in terms of their mother tongue, as Kenworthy state.

Linkage and speech simplifications  Identical neighbouring sounds  Sounds insertion  Asimilation  Coalescence  Elision  Linking

Learning pronunciation could be a difficult issue. But if we present the components in some order, we'll facilitate to our students the learning process and we'll help them to understand what is involved and why it is important to be aware of this components.

Thank you! ALEXANDRA NAIR ZUÑIGA