TOPIC 9: Descripción del sistema fonológico de la lengua inglesa. Modelos y técnicas de aprendizaje.

Percepción,
discriminación y emisión de sonidos, entonaciones, ritmos y acentos. La corrección fonética

nants, they are produced by obstructing the air stream to some extent, and they can be classified using two different
criteria: manner or place of articulation.
Depending on the manner of articulation, they can be:

 Plosives: /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/ and /g/ , which are first sound in these words: 'pull', 'bomb', 'tap', 'dark', 'key' and
'goat'.
 Fricatives: /f/ , /v/, / / , / /, /s/ , /z/ , / / , / / , /h/ , that can be found in 'free', 'van', 'think', 'those', 'see',
'zoo', 'she', 'usual' and 'hat'.
 Affricates: / / and / / in words like 'church' and 'giraffe'.
 Nasals: /m/, /n/ and / / that are the last sound in 'mum', 'sin' and 'king'.
 Liquids: /r/ and /l/; for example in 'road' and 'lion'.
 Semivowels: /w/ and /j/ in the following words: 'wood' and 'you'.
Depending on the place of articulation, they are classified in:

 Bilabials: /p/, /b/, /m/ and /w/.

 Labio-dentals: /f/ and /v/,
 Dentals: / / and / /.
 Alveolars: /t/, /d/, /s/, /z/, /n/, /r/ and /l/.
 Post-Alveolars: / /, / /, / / and / /,
 Palatal: /j/.
 Velars: /k/, /g/ and / / and
 Glottal: /h/.
4. SUPRASEGMENTAL FEATURES OF THE LANGUAGE.

Apart from recognizing and producing individual sounds, a good pronunciation of English depends on other factors above
phoneme level. They are prosodic factors, which are: stress, rhythm and intonation.
Stress is the prominence of one syllable over the rest of syllables of a word. The stress is produced by using a higher
loudness, pitch and/or length. For example, in the word 'table', the first syllable is the stressed one.
An important phenomenon concerning stress relates to its use for grammatical purposes, like in the case of some words
that have the same spelling and pronunciation, but differing in their stress. An example is how we make a difference
between a noun 'present' (in which the first syllable is stressed) and a verb 'present' (in which the second syllable is
stressed).
Rhythm is a sound pattern formed by peaks of prominence over word level. Native speakers of English produce a very
particular rhythm, because they have the tendency to over produce stressed syllables and important words, compared to
other languages. Besides, English is a stress- timed language, which implies that stressed syllables tend to occur at
relatively regular intervals, so it takes the same time to produce two chunks of language between two stressed syllables,
no matter how long the utterances actually are.

Intonation can be defined as the way in which pitch rises and falls in speech. Intonation can accomplish several functions:

 Emotional, when we use it to express feelings.

 Grammatical, emphasizing key words like nouns or verbs.

 Pragmatic, when some additional interactional meanings are conveyed.

In addition, we can distinguish three main types of tones.

 Falling tone, to express certainty in affirmative sentences.

 Rising tone, to ask questions in interrogative sentences.

 Falling-rising tone, to ask for confirmation or to warn others.

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5. MODELS AND TECHNIQUES FOR PRONUNCIATION.

Being good speakers of English is really important, but teachers must also have some practical knowledge about how to
introduce phonological contents into the classroom dynamics. That crucial issue is being analyzed in this part of the
essay.

1
 o onants:

 / / and / / are produced like /s/, confusing words like 'short' and 'sort', or mispronouncing words like 'vision'
or 'usual'.
 /b/ and /v/ are confused, causing problems with 'boat' and 'vote'.
 / / is pronounced like /d/, making words like 'those' sound like 'dose'.
o Prosody

 Concerning stress, Spanish people have difficulties with long words that are stressed in the first syllables, like
'comfortable' or 'vegetable'.
 Regarding rhythm, Spanish is a syllable-timed language, so any syllable takes mostly the same time to be
produced, whereas English is a stressed-timed language, so unstressed syllables are produced faster than
stressed ones.
 As regards intonation, in English a wider pitch range is used.

 Low priority problems

o Vowels:

 /u/ and /u:/ are confused , in words like 'lose' and 'loose'.
 /i/ and /I:/ are pronounced in the same way, making mistakes in words like 'ship' and 'sheep'.
o Consonants:

 /r/ is not dropped when it follows a vowel, like in 'card' or 'more'.

 /z/ is pronounced like /s/ in words like 'zip' or 'zoo'.
 /j/ is produced too strongly, like the phoneme / / in words like 'you'.
 /h/ is pronounced very strongly in words like 'hat' or 'hello'.