UNIT 3 : PHONOLOGY

This unit was about phonology and something of what I realized is that it studies the sounds features of a language. Some examples of these features can be phonemes, words stress, sentences stress and intonation. Phonemes are difficult to define,but Gove (2011) establishes that they are the smallest unit of a sound and that they are presented in a phonemic chart which allows us to know the correct pronunciation of a word or sound. Furthermore, this chart groups the sounds into vowels, diphthongs and consonants.

Something that I comprehend about consonants is that they are divided into voiced and unvoiced sounds and we must be clear about the difference between them to learn the correct pronunciation of words. Thus, in order to define these terms I found that for Beare (2017) the voiced sounds are related with vocal chords while unvoiced sounds do not do it. 

Otherwise, I also learned that all dictionaries have the symbols from the phonemic chart but also this sign “ ’  “ that show the word stress. Word stress also had its categories and they were primary and secondary stress. Primary stress was the word that gives the complete meaning to the sentence and secondary stress referred to the words which were not so important. On the other hand, I believe that it is important to mention that sentence stress, contractions, weak forms, linking and intonation are characteristics of connected speech because they are words joined to make a connected stream of sounds. Another relevant point that I studied was that phonology should be practiced continuously and for that it is necessary to establish good activities. So, according to Levin (2000) sound word discrimination or blending words with different pronunciation are the best activities to make students learn it.

In conclusion, I believe that phonology can help learners to produce the language and recognize some characteristics of oral skill. For example; pronunciation, intonation and word stress are some of them although for this teachers should look for specific tasks to ask students to develop. Some tasks that can be taken into account are those which were mentioned previously.

REFERENCES:

Beare, K. (2017). Voiced and Voiceless Consonants. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/voiced-and-voiceless-consonants-1212092

Gove, M. (2011). What is a phoneme? Phonic Books. Retrieved from  https://www.phonicbooks.co.uk/2011/01/17/what-is-a-phoneme/

Levin, V. (2000). HOW TO TEACH PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS SKILLS. 

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