UNIT 3 PHONOLOGY

The following is not a difficult concept to understand. The author Susan Anderson, in his book Glossary of Linguistic Terms (2003) defined the word Phonology as the study of how sounds are organised and used in natural languages. It makes us to conclude that Phonology is the study of sounds used in a language to communicate meaning. The writter Roger Lass mentioned in his book Phonology: an introduction to basic concepts (1988) that the features of the sounds used in phonology to communicate a meaning involve four important components like phonemes, word stress, sentence stress and intonation. However, and according to the author Susan Anderson, in his book already mentioned, the phoneme is the most necessary feature because a phoneme is the smallest unit of sounds and that small unit of a sound makes the difference in the meaning of any language. For example in the word book, it just takes to add the sound of the letter s (books) to realize that the meaning changed from singular to plural.

As an English teacher, I want to highlight the importance of phonology in a classroom for several reasons. First of all, because its comprehension helps my students to improve their pronunciation. Its comprehension also helps my students to improve their understanding about the words with phonemic symbols that they find in a dictionary. With that comprehension my students will know how to pronounce a word new for them that has been found in a dictionary and has not been pronounced before by the teacher.

References:

Anderson, S. (2003) Glossary of Linguistic terms.

Lass, R. (1988) Phonology: an introduction to basic concepts.

Gimson A. C. (2008) The pronunciation of English.

http://www-01.sil.org/linguistics/glossaryoflinguisticterms/whatisphonology.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonology