Aspects of Teaching and Learning Phonetic Symbols

Aspects of Teaching and Learning Phonetic Symbols The teaching of pronunciation is described as "the Cinderella of language  teaching", i.e. she has never got to go to the ball. That tells the truth.  In contrast to those "princesses" — vocabulary, grammar, reading, writing  and speaking people usually think much of, this "humble lady" has long  been out of favour. But as a matter of fact, one's linguistic competence  depends in a certain measure on his pronunciation which, if is too bad to  communicate with other people, he will only be regarded as a failed  language learner. On the other hand, for an adult, it is not difficult to  enlarge the amount of vocabulary or enhance the knowledge of grammar. But  without a solid foundation of pronunciation at the early stage, it will be  beyond repair in case of fossilization. By this token, Teaching of  pronunciation deserves much more attention than we paid before.  This article ventures some personal ideas on the teaching of phonetic  symbols — the most basic element of pronunciation

I. Why do we have to learn phonetic symbols? To learn or not to learn, that is not the question. The majority of  Chinese and foreign teachers think it is quite necessary.  In terms of teaching rules, learning phonetic symbols as early as possible  is a good way of reducing down the repetition as well as raising up the  memory of words . Those teachers are not baseless by saying that a large  number of students lag behind in Grade Two owing to their failure of  learning phonetic symbols in Grade One thus unable to expand their  vocabulary and improve their reading ability.  In aspect of teaching strategy, mastery of phonetic symbols at the initial  stage usually makes the students feel successful and confident because, in  a sense, they are already independent learners. As a result, tremendous  interest has been kindled. An obvious profit is that, when phonetic  symbols have been taught, most students would preview a lot of new words  of the text. Their speed of learning new words sometimes could make the  teacher greatly surprised. From a long-term view, pronunciation plays an important role in the  formation of some other language skills, like listening, speaking and  reading. There are many people who have learned English for a long time  yet the language capability remains unimproved because of their poor  pronunciation, known as "fossilization". So, Learning phonetic symbols at  the very beginning should become a required course for students.

II. When to start learning? It is a topic worthy of discussion. Some teachers claim that early introduction of phonetic symbols to the  students makes the latter study smoother. They even suggest that the  phonetic symbols be taught at the same time with the alphabet letters.  Their method is to put phonetic transcription on each letter and classify  them by vowels. But I don't think this method conform with teaching rules.  Firstly, Pinyin letters they have learned in primary schools are  inveterate in their mind, but the pronunciations of Pinyi and English  letters are actually different. At this time, teacher's task is to free  students from the molestation of Pinyin letters and have them follow the  correct pronunciation of English letters. If we introduce phonetic symbols  to them here, they will be puzzled and confused with different concepts.  The result is, as we often see, many students write "mai" for "my" and  "tu" for "too" in the dictation. Next, learning letters through phonetic  symbols is not as good an effect as learning phonetic symbols through  letters. There are 26 English letters mostly read as syllables while 48  phonetic symbols all read as phonemes. Research shows that language  learners are more sensible to holistic syllables than to individual  phonemes. Therefore, we can achieve twice the result with half the effort  by learning phonetic symbols through letters so long as we can read these  letters correctly. Some others declare the teaching of phonetic symbols should be conducted  later. They hold that students' main task in the first term is to get in  touch with more language materials and strengthen the linguistic sense.  Systematic learning of phonetic symbols is to be carried out in the second  term. Without doubt, the more language materials the students get, the  easier for them to learn phonetic symbols. But there are still two  shortcomings in doing so. In the first place, in the mother tongue  environment, forgetfulness is the archenemy if we learn a foreign language  through mere imitation. As time passes, students might be fed up with  endless repetition and weary of further study. In addition, under the  circumstance of big-class teaching, students don't have many chances to  practise and the particular instructions from the teacher are limited.  Without instant remedy, it is possible that the more language materials  they received, the more serious their pronunciation errors turned out to  be. Earlier study of phonetic symbols is not expected to put an end to the  problem, but at least better than none. What is the proper time to start teaching phonetic symbols, then? By the  current situation and the textbook in use, in my opinion, the best time is  right after the fourth or fifth unit of JEFC. At this moment, students are  supposed to have a relatively good command of alphabet letters.  Introduction of phonetic symbols now would not be likely to bring about  any trouble. Also, nearly all the phonetic symbols have already appeared  in the words of Unit 4 & 5 once or more and the students have had more or  less sensibility of pronunciation. By having words and phonetic symbols be  complementary to each other, we can get a better result.

III. On what issues should we lay stress in the teaching? Actually, the teaching approaches of phonetic symbols are largely  identical but with minor differences. Popular process is probably:  individual phonemes — monosyllables (fixed syllables) — dis