Teaching speaking and listening to young learners

2.3. INTEGRATING PHONOLOGY IN LANGUAGE SKILLS CLASSES
Phonology is science that studies sounds in particular language. This area of language is very important, particularly for EFL teachers because many of them mispronounced the English words and planted them on the students. For example, the word “great” which is supposed to be pronounced /greit/ is pronounced /grit/, the word ‘answer’ which is supposed to be pronounced /ænsə/ pronounced / ænswə /. Therefore, in pronouncing English words, EFL teachers must be familiar with places of articulation in English such as: stop, fricative, affricative, nasal, and liquid. Moreover, the EFL teacher must know the manner of articulation as well such as: glide, labial, labiodental, interdental, alveolar, velar, and glottal. Moreover, since 1888, an effort has been made to create a universal system for transcribing the sound of speech to help the linguists transcribing languages consistently and accurately. This system is famously known as The International Phonetic Alphabet.

By knowing these features, teacher will be able to minimize the errors in pronouncing English words. Further, phonology is not always about pronouncing English correctly but it also covers stress, pitch and intonation. Stress, pitch, and intonation in English give different color to the words uttered. For instance, in conversation, to form question, it is not necessarily required in form of question. For instance “so, you are leaving?” I think introducing pitch, stress, and intonation to the students are very important because it will make their English language skill particularly speaking skill more fluently and more natural. However, in determining the stress, teachers should be careful since it will change the class of the word or it will even change the meaning of the word. For instance, the word /record/ for noun and /record/ for verb are both pronounced differently. In accordance with this statement, in Contemporary Linguistics an Introduction edited by William O’ Grady and John Archibald stated that intonation is very often serve to transfer a wide-ranging meaningful information.

All in all, learning phonology will contribute a great deal of help for ESL teachers, for phonology deals with element of sounds. This element of sounds includes phonetics, place of articulation, manner of articulation, stress, pitch, and intonation. Furthermore, learning phonology will help teacher minimizing errors in pronouncing and articulating English

All in all, the teaching of phonology has witnessed a considerable amount of changes in both approaches and techniques. Since the rise of traditional approaches to language teaching, teaching pronunciation has gained momentum. However, with the increased focus on the learner in learner-centered approaches and with the continuing emphasis on the communicative aspect of language teaching, teachers have sought new ways of incorporating pronunciation with other language skills. This has resulted in pronunciation being linked mainly to speaking and listening. Nevertheless, one should not deny the role of phonetics and phonology in the teaching of pronunciation since the more students are aware of the precepts and underpinnings of these branches of study, the more they will become aware of the idiosyncrasies of the target language and the more they are likely to achieve a native-like pronunciation.