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This unit focuses on one of the most neglected aspects of teaching English: pronunciation (and phonology). One of the first things an ESL teacher can educate their students in is Intonation. This is the variation in pitch and volume within the context of an entire sentence. It helps lend meaning and signal when someone is done speaking and/or requesting a response from another person. The normal pattern of intonation tends to be a gentle rise and fall. When intonation falls at the end of a sentence it signals, "I'm done. It's your turn to speak." whereas if it rises at the end, it often signals a question that needs answering. Also no intonation or flat intonation can offer the very helpful social cue that the person doesn't have much to say on a subject or simply is not interested in engaging.
On the other hand, which word gets the stress, or emphasis, in a sentence helps determine the meaning. One word per sentence is usually stressed. If there are any secondary ones, they tend to be far more subtle. We stress syllables, NOT individual letters. There are some hard and fast rules as to which syllable within different words get the stress. Here are a few of those rules: 1) Stress goes on the first syllable for most 2-syllable nouns and verbs. 2) The stress goes on the last syllable for most two-syllable verbs. 3) Stress on the penultimate syllable (second-to-last) for words ending in -ic, -sion, -tion. 4) Stress on the ante-penultimate syllable (third-from-last) for words ending in -ive and -al. 5) For compound nouns, the stress goes on the first part. 6) For compound adjectives and verbs, the stress goes on the second part. One final thing to emphasize is that we do not tend to add stress to auxiliary verbs and articles. Techniques for demonstrating stress are using gestures, doing choral work with the students, underlining on the board, using stress marks on the board or on written texts, and showing contrastive stress.
Furthermore, it's crucial that an ESL teacher explain to his/her students that there are four major ways: linking (joining two words in sound), sound dropping (t, d), sound changing, extra lettering and linked speech (whatcha wanna do?)
While the test above focuses heavily on the Phonemic Alphabet, which simply demonstrates, using an Internationally recognized set of symbols, how to pronounce a word. These often appear next to a word when we look it up in a dictionary. Pronunciation is something that can be taught with the aid of mouth diagrams show the shape of the mouth and position of the tongue when making certain sounds.
