Course paper on the theme «Practice and assessment of in teaching pronunciation at all stages elt» done by: 3rd course student of Faculty of Foreign Philology English Teaching Metodology Sayfiddinova Sabohat

1.2.Pronunciation in ELT
Before you start following the guides to aspects of pronunciation, it will be useful to explain / remind you of some of the key areas you need to be familiar with if you are hoping to teach people how to say things acceptably in English.
Phonetics is the study of all speech sounds and is applicable to all languages. It is concerned with how we produce sounds, how they are transmitted physically and how they are perceived and decoded.
Phonology is to do with the sounds of a specific language rather than all human speech and it is this which concerns us here.³
The phoneme is the basic sound unit of a language. We combine phonemes into morphemes (meaning units) and into words. The phoneme is written with its symbol between. The phoneme is an ideal type for the sound it represents. Individual speakers may pronounce certain phonemes quite variably but native speakers will generally reconise which phoneme is being used (and make a mental adjustment if it varies from what they produce). In this sense, phonemes are a way of digitalising the information contained in the sound stream. For example:
Although /b/ and /p/ are distinct phonemes in English, with the first voiced and the second unvoiced, the amount of voicing is not an on-off phenomenon because in some environments voicing will be more energetically done than in others. Compare, for example, the voicing on the /b/ sound in rubber and the same sound at the end of pub. In the former, voicing is at the more extreme end of the cline from /p/ to /b/ than it is in the second case. Nevertheless, native speaker hearers will easily note the difference between pup and pub even though the amount of.
Phonemes may be better described as sets of allophone (see below) than as single sounds. The fact that some of them are variably pronounced is not semantically significant.
Consonants When you produce a sound by completely or partially blocking the air flow through the vocal tract, you produce a consonant. For example, if you block and then release air through pressing your lips together, you will produce the sound If you block the back of your mouth by raising your tongue, you will produce
Vowels If you produce a sound without blocking the air flow you will make a vowel such as the 'a' in cat (/kæt/). The quality of the sound is affected by where your tongue is vertically and horizontally in the mouth and whether your lips are rounded or not.