LESSON 9

Syllable stress

In this lesson, our class had learned one of the important part of pronunciation, syllable stress. There were some rules about which syllable that should be stress.Although the rules were rather complicated but it was totally fun to learn about it. For example, initials of the companies or organizations were usually stressed at the end:
                                                  (BBC, TWA, IBM, IMF, WWF, WHO, NHK)
It was fun when we tried to say that word with the correct pronunciation!

Then, we had to do some activities to make us more clear about this lesson. We were asked to be in pair. One of the partner need to read a poem "English Pronunciation", the other one would wrote it down on a piece of paper.From this, we had learned to be more care about how we pronounced a word and how the pronunciation could effect the meaning of the word.

LESSON 8

Pronunciation table.

Have you ever heard of the pronunciation table? If you take a look at the first page of the dictionary, there will be a table of pronunciation. The table shows the symbols which are used to represent the various sounds of the English language. Today we had learned about the pronunciation table. It is very interesting to actually know how the sounds were made!

The Pronunciation Table

The are two types of sounds, consonant sounds and vowel sounds. The consonant sounds can be divided into two that is voiced and unvoiced. Do you know how to recognised the voiced and unvoiced sound? You can easily know the sounds by putting your fingers in your ear and try to make /p/ and /b/ sounds. The vibration tells that the sound is a voiced sound. Try it out for yourself and experiment with other consonant sounds! Can you differentiate the voiced and unvoiced sounds?

If you take a look at the table shown above, some vowel symbols has two dots after it for example /i:/. The two dots represents that it has a longer vowel sound. For instance:

/i:/ - seat (has a longer 'i' sound)

than

/i/ - sit (short 'i' sound)

These vowels can also be combine to make new vowels that is dipthongs and triphthongs.

Dipthongs- wage, coin, fair, clear
Triphthongs- buyer, power

To increase our understanding on the phonetics symbols and the sounds, we are asked to read aloud and find the consonant, vowel, dipthongs and tripthongs sounds in the two poems  that were taken from Sir Marzuki's standard 5 text book. Last but not least, we also learned about syllable and its rule. It is really interesting to learn about pronunciation because by learning this, we can learn to speak English proficiently.


A lot of thank to Sir Marzuki bin Maulud for such an interesting lecture on this topic :)

Written by: Siti Aisyah binti Nasarudin

LESSON 7

                In week 7, other lecturer enters our class to teach us about phonetic and phonology.  The interaction was with Dr. Annisa.  She shows several videos about how to pronounce every single vowel and consonance.  The native speaker asked to follow how her mouth pronounces the alphabets.  The articulation system such as mouth, lips, teeth, throat and so on are very important.

Figure 1: Articulation system

Figure 2: Position of tongue

Figure 3: Consonance alphabets.

It is very important to pronounce with a correct way so that the information presented can be understood by the listener.

by: Tansu Ciller & Nur Afiqah