PHONOLOGY

Phonology is the study of the sound features used in a language to communicate meaning, these features include phonemes, word stress, sentence stress and intonation.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of a sound that can make a difference to meaning in a language. The phonemes of a language are represented in writing by phonemic symbols, each phonemic symbol represents only one phoneme. Phonemic symbols help the reader know exactly what the correct pronunciation is of each word; the phonemes of English are often shown in a chart called the phonemic chart.

Dictionaries always give phonemic transcriptions of words to show their pronunciation, in the transcription of words there is this sign ˡ which is used to show word stress. In English, stress also influences how sentences and groups of words are pronounced this is called sentence stress and it is a characteristic of connected speech.

As teachers it would be very useful that we know perfectly all the phonetic symbols and teach students as many as possible then it will be easier to look a word up in a dictionary and read the correct pronunciation.