 In what ways are foreign-language teachers who lack appropriate and practical training in phonetics and phonology disadvantaged?

 

Phonology is :

 

(a) The study of word-to-word relations in sentences; that is, how sound

patterns are affected by the combination of words

(b) The investigation of intonation patterns.

( Jack C. Richards and Richard Schmidt,1985:435 )

 

Lacking appropriate and practical training in phonetics and phonology means the teacher is unable to explain sounds to student which means he can’t make them read properly . Reading is the cornerstone for any learner , students can’t move forward without reading correctly , they cant gain new words . reading correctly results in better spelling even though there are a lot of irregular words due to the variety of the English roots however most of the follow certain rules so student can spell words more easily if they were able to read correctly .

 

Teachers with weak phonological background usually face a lot of hardship with beginner students because this is something I used to face before getting deep into phonology . Beginner students need learn through reading even if they didn't have much vocabulary , reading would make a lot of things easier . Teaching phonology is like building the foundation of the English tower , the stronger it is , the taller the tower can get . The teachers’ main aim is to teach students English correctly and teaching phonology incorrectly results in defective listing , writing , speaking and reading skills . all the basic skills would be affected .

 

Teachers should be role models for students and having phonological issues would affect their accentual skills , beside he wouldn’t be able to answer a lot of reasonable question considering pronunciation .

 

Stress and intonation are to major factors in sounding natural when speaking beside stress is a determinant of meaning for a lot of words . Some words have the same spelling but have different meaning when read in a different stress or intonation for example “ present , read , live “

 

Connected speech and other phonological skills would be all missing or affected due to poor teaching which would lead to difficulty in understanding connected speech patterns . Listing is a great learning resource and not being able to understand defeats the whole purpose of studying English . Not being able to understand  what you hear  brings an impossibility to answer . This impossibility or lets say difficulty will face that teacher’s students . I am not saying that students can’t learn from phonology , in fact , a lot of student learned a lot about this language without going through phonology but they would never be able to learn the actual academic English .

Accent , stress and intonation can be learnt through mimicry but this is not an academic way and those learners can never read new words or understand unless they hear them and this method could take up years of living in an English speaking society .

 

 

To sum it up , a teacher must have a sufficient background about teaching phonology with plenty of related activities otherwise he would be not be able to go deeper and further with his students . Intermediate and advance levels are almost based on phonology and phonetics and that gap cant be ignored because a student can’t jump ten steps at a time and those ten steps are phonology .