SOUNDS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

If we consider the spoken language, it will be obvious that it is made up of sounds. The baby crying is making a sound just as the politician making speech is, although it is to be hoped that the latter’s sounds will be somewhat more sophisticated! But how do the sounds work?

On their own, sounds may well be meaningless. If you say /t/ ( the lines show that this is phonetic script ) a few times, e.g. ‘tu, tu, tu’ it will not mean very much in English. The same will be true of the sound /k/ or the sound /a/ or /s/. on their own they are meaningless, but rearranged those sounds in a different order and you will come up with the word ‘cats’, instantly recogniseble to any speaker of english.

All words are made up of sounds like this, and a speaker of a language needs to know the sounds of that language. Indeed many problems are caused when people speak foreign languages because they can not reproduce the correct sounds. The native speaker of spanish, for example , often has difficulty with the /v/ in English, and may say ‘bery’ instead of ‘very’. The native speaker of japanese has problems when speaking English with the sounds /l/ and /r/ and may say ‘light’ when meaning to say ‘right’. The native speaker of English, however, will not make these mistakes for the knowns what the sounds of English are and he knowns how they are put together. He will have considerable difficilty, though, with spanish or japanese sounds!