![]() “I will never need the German alphabet!” … until one day, they do. “I just want to be able to speak!” they say. We all learn the alphabet in our native language in kindergarten, but people rarely pay much attention to it when learning a foreign language. If you think the students have enough time to do this and can keep the British and American pronunciations separate (sticking to the one they are learning while still recognising whether the pronunciation they are faced with is the one they should use or not), then maybe a combination of multiple phonemic alphabets can be used.German Alphabet: Why Is It Important to Learn and Know It? This means that in total, students have to learn 17 monothong sounds (5 American, 6 British, 6 common) and 9 dipthong sounds, meaning 26 vowel sounds in total. The American phonemic alphabet has 11 monothongs (British has 12), of which 6 also appear in the British phonemic alphabet, and 5 dipthongs (British has 8), four of which also appear in the British phonemic alphabet. As I said before, the consonants are the same, but the vowels have some variation. If you offer multiple dialects for your students to learn (like I do), this can be more challenging. you only teach British English or American English, for example), choose the phonemic alphabet which corresponds to what and how you teach. If you are a mono-dialect English teacher (i.e. My recommendation would be to go for a phonemic alphabet. If you know the local language and are sure about IPA transcription, you can relate IPA to the students' native language(s) for them to learn, but that means a lot more effort on your part. ![]() There are many sounds that are not used in English and therefore will not be used in the classroom. Ok, so you'll teach one of the systems, but which one? In my opinion, IPA is too complex for everyone to learn. In short, learning IPA or phonemics can make your students more independent in their studies. It is also a way to show how something is pronounced that can be looked at by students at any time. Make sure you know which uses which before advising your students!), meaning they can study more on their own. Students can now get the pronunciation of words from dictionaries (note: some dictionaries use IPA while others use their local version of phonemic alphabets. ![]() Once you have invested the time though, it does help students tremendously. Do you have enough time for that? Are your students familiar with the Roman and Greek alphabets? Students of non-Roman alphabet written languages, such as Arabic, Russian and Chinese will easily get confused after learning the alphabet for English and then having to relearn parts of it for the pronunciation alphabets. A big disadvantage is that you have to learn the system and so do your students. Both systems provide advantages and disadvantages. So the big questions for teachers: is it worth using IPA and/or phonemic charts in the classroom? This really depends on a few factors. ![]() This means that the vocal chords are not being used and the sound is being produced from some other part of your vocal pathway, such as from the lips like 'p' in 'pea'. In contrast, grey letters are unvoiced sounds. Put you fingers on your throat and if you feel it vibrating, sound is being produced by the vocal chords, meaning that the sound in voiced. The black letters are voiced, meaning that the vocal chords do some work when saying the letter, like the 'th' in the word 'this'. In this part, you will see some letters in grey and some letters in black. Amongst the different dialects of the English language, there is very little variation in the consonants, so this part of the chart is more or less the same for every phonemic alphabet (in English). Let's start at the bottom with the consonants. The chart to the left is the standard phonemic chart for British English. only the one alphabet, IPA).įor most European languages (on which IPA is originally based), phonemic alphabets are little more than simplified versions of the IPA alphabet where the unused sounds and modifiers have been removed. each one has a different phonemic alphabet, while phonetics is not restricted in the same way and so encompasses all of the world's language (i.e. For our purposes, what we need to know is that phonemics is more specialised for each language, dialect and general, i.e. If this sounds confusing, its because there is much overlap between the two. Wait, phonemics ? I thought we were talking about phonetics? What is phonemics? Well, phonetics is the study of speech sounds physiologically and acoustically while phonemics focuses on sound distributions within a language.
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