Aspects of Teaching and Learning Phonetic Symbols

yllables  (polysyllables) — words. But there are several issues should be taken into  special consideration. ● Never teach individual phonemes much in depth. Phonemes themselves  make no sense. Syllables and words are our ultimate goal. Don't spend too  much time on phonemes or still worse, impose terminologies like plosives,  fricatives, affricates or theories like the movement of pronunciation  organs upon the students in hope of helping them master phonetic symbols  quickly. These things will by no means do anything helpful. On the  contrary, they are too abstract and scholastic to be understood by  students and will be taking the edge off their interest. In fact, children  have strong aptitude to imitation. What the teacher need to do is telling  them necessary tips of pronunciation and they can handle these tips  automatically. ● Syllables and words for practice ought to be carefully chosen. It is  quite a long process from phonemes to syllables. Statistic made by Jerry  Coker demonstrates that even a learner can read out all the phonemes  precisely, when it comes to random syllables, the correctness is no more  than 44% on an average. Thereby, syllables ought to be chosen mainly from  the learned words that are familiar to the students instead of those long  and complicated ones for drill before turning to whole words that should  also be well known to the students. The teacher writes down the phonetic  symbols and let students recognise what the word is. By combining  pronunciation, shape and meaning together, the memory of this word  intensified. ● Chinese-character-transcription on English words should be treated  rightly. As the case stands, the phenomenon is ubiquitous and dies hard  among Chinese students. It is generally thought as a devil in language  learning which does nothing good but all harm. But I think, it should be  looked on from another point of view. As we all know, the greatest  interference for a foreign language learner is his mother tongue because  all the knowledge he got — including pronunciation, of course — are from  his own language. David Dalton noticed that beginners of a target language  are inclined to convert almost every sound — especially when it is not  clearly received — into the closest sound in the source language and  follow it unconsciously. Rod Ellis thought that the L1 could be viewed as  a contributing factor to the development of SLA (Second Language  Acquisition). As the learner's proficiency of L2 grows, the influence of  L1 will become less powerful. At this angle, labelling Chinese characters  on English words shouldn't be totally denied because it indicates that the  students are willing to acquire English with the help of Chinese. As a  teacher, we should first of all explain to them how dangerous and  unscientific of doing so, and at the meantime, have some prior expectation  of what elements of English phonetics are likely to cause problems in  order to prevent these problems from happening or solve them at once.  The writer gathered some frequent errors of students for reference only.  (See the appendix: List of Common Phonetic Errors from Students)

IV. How long will the learning of phonetic symbols last? According to the second

level of syllabus of English for junior high  school, students are demanded to be able to pronounce monosyllables and  disyllables proficiently with the help of IPA (International Phonetic  Alphabet). This is the lowest request for those who have learned all the  phonetic symbols. Nevertheless, it doesn't mean the end of study. Students  should also be capable of breaking any comparatively complex polysyllable  into units, an extreme example as "antidisestablishmentarianism". And the  process keeps going on until students can pronounce regular words at the  sight of them and irregular words with the help of phonetic symbols.  Johanna Rubba advocates that sufficient "chunk" drills be done, meaning  the phonograms are treated as a whole rather than divided letters. For  example,(name, fame, tame, dame, game, lame, came, hame, same,  flame)；(bill, pill, till, fill, mill, kill, will, still, skill,  shill)；(back, pack, Jack, lack, sack, hack, knack, flack, smack, snack).  Luckily, the summing-up exercise of pronunciation at the end of each unit  in JEFC makes the teaching more or less convenient. But by Jerry Coker,  one's phonetic level, ultimately, relies on his vocabulary. In his  opinion, never will a person be able to pronounce any stochastic word  unless he has a vocabulary of about 2,500 in store. In this sense, the  continuity of teaching phonetic symbols would go through the whole period  of junior high school. By the way, individual word is not the only criterion of pronunciation.  Rhythm, stress and intonation are sometimes more important in real  communication. That is to say, phonetic symbols are only half the story.  The development of pronunciation proportionates to the linguistic ability  in the end.

V. How to test the students' level of phonetic symbols? Two matters should be taken into consideration. Firstly, as it is  mentioned just now, single phonemes are actually meaningless. In the test,  syllables and words should be used mostly. Secondly, make sure that the  testing measures are suitable for the current situation, namely, slight  discrimination of environment and devices, accessibility of  mass-examination. Three feasible measures are given below. 1 Choral reading The teacher will select a group of syllables or words and let the students  read them aloud together. Its defect is obvious. The tester may not have a  good control of the procedure, and it's very hard to sift out the testees'  specific errors. The advantage of this measure is its easy operation and  the possibility of finding out universal errors. It remains to be a useful  method when the tester just wants to know an overall situation instead of  detailed information of any individuality.&nbs

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