Hello and welcome to talk about English. I’m Callen Robertson(?).
in today’s program we are
going to be looking at the topic of pronunciation. What makes good pronunciation and what is
it that native speakers do when they’re talking that you can do to make your spoken English
more fluent and natural.
To discuss this topic, I’ve been joined today by a teacher, trainer and material’s writer, Allen
Stenson.
+Hello Allen.
-Hello.
+ When learning a language there are many things to study and practice. Such as vocabulary
and grammar. Skills like reading, writing and speaking. A key to good speaking is good
pronunciation. Allen, first, how important do you think the pronunciation is as a language skill
and what do we mean by good pronunciation?
-Well people want to be understood when they speak to others. They don’t want their words to
be mistaken from other words because they haven’t pronounced it very well. I remember I hear
a story, this is absolutely true story, about a lady who was visiting London and she wanted to
buy a train ticket to Istanbul in turkey. So she went to Victoria station to inquire about trains to
turkey and unfortunately she was sold ticket to torquay, which is a town in southwest of
England and completely being opposite direction. Now there’s a difference between turkey and
torquay. So, good pronunciation is important because you could easily be misunderstood
- yes, I think good pronunciation has to be clear and comprehensible. Not placing a strain on
the listener and making your meaning absolutely clear so that you are not misunderstood but
of course it doesn’t have to be a perfect imitation of any particular native speaker accent.
+ Right, so where do learners, where should learners start with pronunciation? Because
something students often say is spelling English is very different from the pronunciation.
-we have 26 letters in alphabet that we use in English but we have 44 sounds. So the spelling is
not always a good guide to the pronunciation but we can use phonemic symbols, 44 phonemic
symbols. 1 for each sound. This symbols represent the sounds of words accurately and is
possible to find out the correct pronunciation of a word by using a dictionary. Because after the
spelling of the word, next thing is that word in phonemic symbols so if you know these symbols,
they are not difficult to learn. You can find out the pronunciation just by looking at the
dictionary and you don’t really need to ask your teacher.
+ now you mentioned before that students don’t need to have native speaker accent. Is that
right?
-I think that’s right. I mean there are many many acceptable accents. Not simply one native
accent in English and there’s providing people’s pronunciation clear and comprehensible and it
doesn’t matter if they have an accent from their first language. I don’t think that’s a problem.
However, it’s important to understand native speakers whose speech inevitably will be fast and
fluent and this make chores difficult for learners and I think it’s important to know what native
speakers do when they speak because it helps comprehension and it’s useful for listening to the
radio, for television, for films. Even if you don’t actually meet any native speakers face to face
you may will be exposed to lots of native speakers through electronic meetings…
+ so let’s have a look now At some of these things that native speakers do when they’re
speaking. So what’s the first one…?
-one important feature is that……… pronunciation of vowel sounds. for example, the word
‘’and’’ is often pronounced ‘’end’’ in phrase like ‘’fish and chips’’ and preposition ‘’to’’ is often
pronounced ‘’ta’’ if you say “ let’s go to Cambridge” for example. It just sounds like “ta”
I don’t understand 4:34 to 4:38
+yes in fact there’s a name for this weak(???) formers called shuar and phonemic symbol looks
like upside downed e and it’s very very common.
So that shuar the weak(?) from a movie. Hearing some examples of that later on the program.
But there is another interesting thing about spelling and pronunciation and it’s that the
number of letters in a word as not the same as number of sounds found in a word.
~Maede Moahed
