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

I went to London with my brother (i.e., it was not someone else who went with my brother)

I went to London with my brother (i.e., not someone else's brother)

Stress and syllable timing The following is the theory.
There are, it is claimed, two fundamental forms of stressing.
In some languages, such as French, Italian, Spanish, Cantonese and Mandarin, every syllable is perceived as taking up the same amount of time. This is the so-called 'machinegun 'sound of the languages. So we get: I went to London with my brother.
In other languages, notably English, Dutch, Persian languages and Scandinavian languages, some syllables take longer to utter than others and this results in a reduction I went to London with my brathe(r) That's stress timing.
For this reason, the preposition to is not pronounced in its full form as /tuː/ (rhyming with 'two' and 'too') but with a weak form of the vowel /tə/. The funny, upside-down 'e' is called a schwa and is the commonest weak form in English. Additionally, my is often reduced to m' and so on and in most varieties of British English the final /r/ sound on brother is not pronounced.
Be aware that even if this distinction exists, it is not an either-or one. Languages will vary along a cline from syllable- to stress-timing tendencies.
There is, in fact, a third form of timing: Mora timing. In Japanese, e.g., a vowel (V) takes the same time to utter as a consonant (C) plus a vowel so V takes the same time as CV and CVV takes twice as long as CV. Slovak is often considered also to be a Mora-timed language.

3.Breen M.P., & Littlejohn, A.P. (2000). Classroom Decision-Making.Cambridge University Press.

Practice and assessment of in teaching pronunciation at all stages ELT

1. 
   Practice of in teaching pronunciation at all stages ELT
   

Teaching pronunciation is often a neglected or ignored in English language. Nevertheless, correct pronunciation is without doubt a fundamental feature of successful communication in the English language. For this reason, attention should be paid to teaching pronunciation right from the beginning of English language teaching. However, different age groups learners require different approaches and techniques and these are addressed in this paper.
Place of teaching pronunciation English pronunciation is very difficult for foreign learners and it is due to the fact that spelling and pronunciation are two different matters. On the top of it, speech sounds of English are unlikely to be identical to the speech sounds of the mother tongue of the learners. There might be differences in placement of word stress, quality and intensity of syllables, speech rhythm, intonation, etc. It is quite common to assimilate English sounds to the mother tongue sounds and to apply other suprasegmental features of the native language to pronunciation of English. However, in teaching English pronunciation, such assimilation should be avoided and learners
need to be taught correct segmental and suprasegmental features of pronunciation.
According to Gilakjani (2011) those who start learning English after their school years have greater difficulties in acquiring intelligible pronunciation and the degree of difficulty increases with age. However, Králová (2010) claims that learners of any age are able to create additional phonetic categories for new language sounds which do not correspond to the mother tongue sounds. The fact is that there are learners of English at all ages and that teaching pronunciation should not be concerning only children but also adults.
Role of teaching pronunciation in schools is very unfavourable next to teaching grammar or vocabulary. This is a problem of English teaching in many countries. ⁵Experienced teachers are not keen to teach pronunciation and they claim that there is not clear guidance in textbooks and that the isolated exercises do not bring the wanted effect (Griffiths, 2011). Teachers often claim that there is not enough time for teaching pronunciation in their classes.
(Gilbert, 2008) and they are more confident to teach grammar and vocabulary (Datko, 2013). Teachers also complain that they do not receive enough training in methodology of teaching pronunciation. For the fact how difficult the English pronunciation is, there is very little attention paid to teaching and developing it. According to Haycraft (1978) foreign teachers of English ignore teaching pronunciation because they themselves do not have enough confidence.
However, teaching pronunciation is inevitable in ELT and it needs to be integrated right from the beginning, taught regularly and included in to daily classroom procedures. Factors influencing learning pronunciation According to Králová (2016) a foreign language competence (including pronunciation competence) cannot be limited to the contrastive analysis of two language systems. An individual’s pronunciation competence depends on relations to the language systems (phonic interference) and extralingual environment (Sabol, 1993). Extralingual factors include the type of language contact (direct, mediated, occasional, permanent), the form of contact (natural, artificial), the type of bilingualism (individual, group) and the type of bilingualism (learnt one of the languages as an adult, learnt both languages as a child, learnt both languages as a child, one being suppressed).Gilakjani (2011) names the following factors affecting pronunciation in a foreign language. Native accent influences pronunciation in a foreign language. The older the learner
gets, the stronger is the effect of native accent. Stress, intonation and rhythm effect intelligibility more than errors in single sounds. Exposure and motivation for learning the foreign language also determine learners’ development of pronunciation. Personal or professional motivation for learning English can result in desire for native-like pronunciation.Some learners are more adept at requiring correct pronunciation than others. Pronunciation
Attitude Inventory measures learners’ relation to the target language pronunciation. Students who are more concerned about their target language pronunciation usually gain better pronunciation. Motivation, positive attitudes, exposure to the target language, and openness to the target culture influence the success in foreign language proficiency and pronunciation. According to Pennington (1994) is pronunciation viewed as a component of linguistics rather than conversational fluency. Teachers regard pronunciation very little importance in conversational classes and they view it as the least useful out of language skills and therefore sacrifice teaching pronunciation in order to spend time on other areas of language (Elliot,1995). There is a question whether explicit instruction can help in learning foreign pronunciation. It was found out that phonetic instruction to adult learners of English can largely improve their allophonic articulation. Age is a strong determining factor influencing foreign language pronunciation. It is closely connected to the theory of Critical Period Hypothesis (Lenneberg, 1967) which states that children between 2 and 13 can achieve native-like proficiency in acquiring a foreign language, especially pronunciation (Loewen, Reiders, 2011). According to this theory, older learners of a foreign language can rarely achieve native-like fluency and pronunciation. According to Králová (2010) ability to create separate categories for foreign language sounds similar to the sounds of the mother tongue is decreasing from the age of six years.According to Avery and Ehrlich (1992) sound patterns of the mother tongue are transferred into the foreign language. When the sound is absent in the native sound inventory, the learners might not be able to pronounce the sounds. Combining sounds rules in native language might be different to the target language. Stress, rhythm and intonation patterns of the native language might be transferred to the target language. All these factors might cause problems for learners because the rules are language specific and can vary from one language to another.