Amercican Pronounciation Patterns

Egypt Morocco Blog
This lecture was given by
Dr. Kenneth Allen Hyde

In this lecture or workshop we learned that the trick to teaching pronounciation is to understand the articulation of sounds. When teaching ESL students, it's usually more important that they understand the artuculation movement rather than the technical terms. And from theis workshop Dr. Hyde said that transcription helps students focus on the actual pronounciation of English. It also forces them to confront the fact about English that our spelling system is only tangentially related to ur pronounciation. In addition, students usually need help with suprasegmental aspects of pronounciationthat involve more than one sound at a time. This an example of some suprasegmental issues that students may have questions about:

Syllables:
In English every vowel sound and every syllabic consonent (and not letter) is counted as syllable.

Stress:
English stress is created by an increase in pitch, volume, length, and clarity of the vowel in the stressed syllable.
Intonation: English speakers use a downward intonation to indicate the end af a group of related words.
Syllable length: Using a correct vowel length can help listeners guess correctly. Long vowels signal that the following consonant is voiced, while short vowels signal that the following consonant is voiceless.


Prepared by
Kamal Eldeen