Year: 2013-2014
Professor: María Rodríguez
Class: INGL 4011
College: University of Puerto Rico, Cayey Campus
Grace H. Rodríguez Cruz
843 09 6818
ENGL4011- Phonetics
Many of the teachers I’ve had the
opportunity to take classes with struggle to get the attention of the students.
From the main complains I’ve heard, the excuse I hear the most to not pay
attention to class is how much the teacher lacks the correct articulations and
accent. Due to this, the students lose credibility in the teacher and stamp the
“incompetence” sticker on the forehead without making any further observation. Henry
Sweet, the creator of the phonetic alphabet believed that phonetics was “the
indispensable foundation of all study in language…” In other words, these
teachers may have known many of what they might’ve been teaching, but they didn’t
know how to grasp the essence of the word in the pronunciation. That is what
the future teachers need to prevent and what we need to obtain and wrap it
around our students’ head to give to the world as a gift.
The knowledge of phonetics gives the
teacher an advantage when it comes to planning strategies for a better learning
of the English pronunciation. The students will be exposing their learned
material from past classes, giving an idea of how much there is and how much is
needed. The diagnosis of this will help on making a better daily plan to the
groups that include the material and more participation in reading and
answering in front of class. Besides helping in their skills of projection in
front of crowds; this will give us the opportunity to help correct the phonetic
errors while a good communication is being developed. The orthography can be
also checked with the knowledge of phonetics by helping out in story writing
and essay making instead of the basic questions the students are used to answer
and break the monotone replies consisting in building sentences around the same
words of a question. The students will learn how to express themselves
creatively and correctly while their own personality starts to shine in paper. The
pragmatics is essential to our students. The rules of conversation are crucial
and understanding the pragmatics of language is something that should be
constantly reminded to our students.
Whatever they learn or remember will be
the educator’s responsibility. And even if the students forget a thing or two
in the end, the most important goal for a teacher is to alert the groups of
errors and to correct themselves when they do them. The self-awareness is one
of the most important objectives when it comes to learning a second language,
and it will be satisfactory to pass on the introspective to the fresh minds.
The ability to understand and to correct what is wrong is the fresh start of a different
L2 learning generation.
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