This document discusses English phonetics and phonology. It covers the key concepts of phonetics, phonology, vowels, consonants, models and techniques for teaching pronunciation, and differences between English and Spanish phonological systems. Phonetics studies how sounds are physically produced, while phonology studies how sounds combine to form meaning. English has more complex patterns of stress, rhythm and intonation than Spanish. Techniques for teaching pronunciation include repetition, songs, stress and rhythm activities, and role plays focusing on suprasegmentals. Errors must be corrected indirectly to avoid damaging fluency.

1. TOPIC 9. ENGLISH PHONETICS AND
PHONOLOGY. DESCRIPTION OF THE
ENGLISH PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM. MODELS
AND TECHNIQUES. PERCEPTON,
DISCRIMINATION AND PRODUCTION OF
SOUNDS, INTONATION, RHYTHM AND
STRESS. PHONETIC CORRECTION.

2. PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
 Phonetics studies physical properties, how the
sounds are produced by the articulator organs
(lips, tongue, jaw- tongue complex and vocal
tract).
 Phonology studies how sounds alternate to
form meaning. Phonology has two main
branches:
• Segmental: Vowels and Consonants.
• Suprasegmental: especially Stress, Intonation
and Rhythm.

3. VOWELS
Vowels can be defined as linguistic sounds produced with a relatively open
vocal tract ad little impedance to airflow.
Quantity refers to the difference
between long and short vowels.
Quality pays attention to: the place of
articulation, tenseness and height of
the tongue, nasalization, lip rounding
and jaw opening.

4. Glide or Diphthong
Combinations of two vowels which form a single syllable. They have the same
length as long than pure vowels. The stress in the glides appears on the first
element. In English we can find eight glides:

5. Semivowels
We can find two consonants that share characteristics of vowels and
consonants. They are /j/ and /w/. They are pronounced like vowels but
we use them like consonants since they appear before vowels.

6. Consonants
a) The manner of articulation describes how the consonant is
articulated, such as nasal (through the nose), stop (complete
obstruction of air), or approximant (vowel- like).
b) The place of articulation is the spot in the vocal tract where the
obstruction of the consonants occurs, and where speech organs are
involved. Places include: bilabial (both lips), alveolar (tongue
against the gum ridge), and velar (tongue against soft palate).
c) Position of the soft palate. When it is lowered the sound is nasal
and when is raised is oral.
d) The phonation of a consonant is how the vocal cords vibrate during
articulation. When the vocal cords vibrate fully, the consonant is
called voiced. When they do not vibrate at all, it’s voiceless.
A consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial
closure of the upper vocal tract. Each consonant can be distinguished by several
features:

7. CONSONANTS

8. MODELS AND TECHNIQUES
• Models:
The mother tongue affects L2 phonological acquisition and
production; transfer is usually detected through errors in speech.
English pronunciation has sounds Spanish doesn’t have. We have
to concentrate on the differences between the students’ L1 and L2
when working on pronunciation, especially the sounds we don’t
have in our language.
• Techniques:
a) Sounds: Repetition of sounds after listening, students can sing
songs with the lyrics (karaoke); distinguish between words that have
similar sound or pronunciation.
b) Stress: We can use the Phonetic bingo, in which the students cross
out from a card the words that teacher says; clap on the stressed
syllable of a word, etc.
c) Rhythm: Jazz chants, tongue twisters, riddles, jokes, poems,
nursery rhymes, clap on the stressed word of the sentence.
d) Intonation: Role- plays, reading a text the students stand up when
they hear a rising tone or duck when they hear a falling tone.

9. Phonetics
• Articulator phonetics studies how the sounds
are produced via the interaction of different
physiological structures (position, shape and
movement of the speech organs.).
• Acoustic phonetics investigates properties of
sound waves (amplitude, duration, frequency…).
• Auditory phonetics concerns with the learning
of speech sounds and with speech perception by
the brain.
Phonetics is the study of the physical aspects of speech and it has
three branches:
Human beings follow a pattern when learning to produce a sound.
First they have to listen to it and understand what they are hearing. Then,
they have to discriminate it from other sounds. Once they do these two
things, they will be able to produce the desired sound.

10. Suprasegmental phonology
• Stress is defined as the auditory prominence of
a vowel or syllable. From a production point of
view, the speaker has to make a big muscular
effort. From a perception point of view, stresses
syllables are usually the longest, the most high-
pitched and the loudest.
• Rhythm is defined as the regular succession of
strong and weak stress in utterances.
• Intonation is defined as the variation of pitch
(tone) when speaking. Human beings change
pitch movements rising and falling to convey
different meaning in the sentence. For example:
questions, to express emotions (greetings,
surprise, doubt, etc.). Proper use of intonation is
an essential part of fluency.

11. PHONETIC CORRECTION
Human learning is a process that involves the making of
mistakes. They provide evidence of how language is learned or
acquired. It’s crucial to make distinction between errors and
mistakes:
• Mistakes refer to performance errors that aren’t the
result of a deficiency in competence, but the result of
lapses in the process of producing speech. All people
make mistakes in their mother tongue or in the second
language but speakers are capable of recognising and
correcting them.
• Errors are those lapses that are the result of
incompetence in the language. These can be
pronunciation errors, grammatical errors, etc.
If we are practicing pronunciation we have to correct instantly, but if we are
doing a speaking production activity (where the importance is fluency) we have
to allow students to finish the sentence or the intervention. Errors in the most
cases should be corrected in an indirect and subtle way.

12. Differences between English and Spanish
• Phonologically, English is more difficult than Spanish due
to the low correspondence between sounds and its graphic
representation.
• Vowels, Spanish learners tend to equate the twelve English
vowels with its five. We don’t have long and short vowels.
• Consonants: It’s difficult to differentiate between voiceless
and voiced. Our Spanish /t/ is dental and the English one is
alveolar.
• Stress: English has more variability with respect to the
position of word stress than Spanish. Spanish prefers to
stress in the penultimate syllable and English on the first
syllable.
• Rhythm. Spanish is syllable- timed, whereas English is
stressed- time.
• Intonation. Spanish has three intonation patterns
(declarative, interrogative and exclamative) while English
has more.