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

Semi-vowels are sounds which are produced like vowels but actually don't function like them. An example is the sound at the beginning of the word yet. The y letter represents a consonant in this case but at the end of the word fly, it is a vowel and transcribed as. The letter w also has this characteristic: at the beginning of was it is close to being a consonant (called a glide, in the trade) but in the centre of cower it is a vowel sound so the transcription of was cowering is
Markedness In some theoretical approaches, it is asserted that certain phonemes are more heavily marked than others. For example, the unvoiced consonants (/p/, /t/, /k/ etc.) are less marked, and therefore more ubiquitous across languages than their voiced equivalents (/b/, /d/, /ɡ/ etc.). The significance is that these marked phonemes are more difficult to acquire because they are not common to most languages, and deserve more attention. Vowels, too may betray the same distinctions with high back vowels being less marked than low front vowels. For more, see the guide to markedness (new tab).
Minimal pairs are words which differ in meaning because of a change to a single phoneme. In fact, this is part of the definition of a phoneme.
For example, the words, cat and hat are only distinguished by the first phoneme; /k/ in the first case, /h/ in the second. In English, these are minimal pairs so the sounds are phonemes. Some languages do not recognise the distinction between /h/ and /k/ in this way so in those languages the words are not minimal pairs and the sounds are
For example, /p/ and /b/ can readily be seen to be phonemes in English by applying the minimal pairs test. We know that bat and pat are different words with different meanings so the sounds, /p/ and /b/, are phonemes. In some languages (e.g., most varieties of Arabic) changing /b/ to /p/ will have no effect on the meaning of a word so in those languages the sounds are not phonemes.
To see how minimal pairs may be exploited in the classroom, see the guide to teaching troublesome sounds (new tab).