"An Overview of Phonetics and its Importance in Effective Communication"

AN OVERVIEW OF PHONETICS AND ITS IMPORTANCE IN EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

                             Sona Stanley

               sonastanley2426@gmail.com

Abstract

      Pronunciation is vital to proper communication. Learners with good pronunciation are likely to be understood even if they make errors in other areas, whereas learners with bad pronunciation will not be understood, even if their grammar is perfect. Thus the incorrect use of pronunciation hamper communication. The second language learners find pronunciation as one of the most difficult aspects of english to acquire. But pronunciation instruction is often neglected area in teaching English. But the increased focus in second language (English) acquisition necessitates the pronunciaton instruction in class.

        Pronunciation is closely linked to the study of phonetics, which involves the scientific study and description of speech sounds. Learning phonetics helps in recognizing both familiar and unfamiliar sounds and improves pronunciation skills.

Keywords: Pronunciation Instruction, phonetics, International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Content

          Language is nothing but a source of communication, a medium of conveying our ideas to one another. In this era of globalization, information and communication technolgy, English has a special and pre-dominant role in the communicative sphere of the world and people are urged to be able to communicate globally. Recognizing the significance of English language in the present era, the educationists and the teachers start to pay adequate attention to teaching english. And they look out for new and interesting ways to stimulate our language learners.

           The major aims of teaching a second language is to make learner's able to communicate english fluently and accurately. According to Tsojan and Aji (2014) "Pronunciation is a vital aspect of language learning as poor pronunciation distorts or mars the communication process. Every speaker of a language requires good pronunciation skills. In other words, good speaking requires good pronunciation especially when one is communicating with people outside one's immediate linguistic environment or speech community". Thus pronunciation is an aspect of verbal communication which makes he communication more attractive and effective. Without being fluent in pronunciation, no one can be competent in using English language. It is because, everyone judge people by the way they speak, and so learners with poor pronunciation may be judged as incompetent,uneducated or lacking in knowledge.

           As non-native speakers of the language, students do commit a lot of pronunciation mistakes while communicating in English language. It ultimately leads to misunderstanding between speakers and listeners. Teachers are frequently left in the dark about how to teach pronunciatiom and are confronted with conflicting methods. Over the years english teachers have found that for teaching pronunciation student should know and produce appropriate sounds for letters and their combination in different words. So the Phonetics instruction become integral in teaching the pronunciation for effective communication.

            According to Al-zayed (2017) " the science of phonetics is concerned with explaining the sounds of speech and the patterns they produce. Among its many practical uses, the one that most readers would think of first is teaching and mastering pronunciation of second language". Understanding that alphabets are arbitrary and it will not help the language learners to pronounce words in language properly and realizing the effectiveness of phonetic instruction, phonetic instruction became a new trend in the field of ESL classroom. And several studies revealed that it helps in recognizing both familiar and unfamiliar sounds, improves pronunciation skills and develops autonomy in words and sound recognition.

             There are three types of phonetics:-

1) Articulatory phonetics

2) Auditory phonetics 

3) Acoustics phonetics

      Articulatory phonetics studiea how the movement of the air stream and the apeech organs co-ordinates in the production of the sound. On the other hand, Auditory phonetics is a vast area, deals with your ability to distinguish sounds, its length, pitch and loudness influences the reaction. It simply means your ability to decode what you hear and what you have perceived. And lastly, Acoustic phonetics deals with how the sound travels through the medium of air between the speaker and listener.

          Phonetic instruction in second language teaching classes deals with the first two types of phonetic studies, that is, articulatory and auditory. Auditory phonetics consists of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) teaching. IPA is the script to transcribe the speech sounds. It helps to pronounce  words correctly. By studying the phonetic scripts and its respective sounds the learners can easily learn to pronounce  familiar words and even the new unfamiliar words by simply referring the words and its phonetic transciption written in the dictionary. And it helps to recognize the articulation, correct pitch and  stress of the respective words. Articulatory phonetics teach the learners how to use the speech organs to pronounce particular sounds. So after learning to distinguish the correct sounds in a word through IPA, we can practice to pronounce the words by articulating the sounds in its respective manner of production.

      

Benefits of teaching phonetics to ESL learners

         There there so many benefits of teaching phonetics to the children who are second language learners. They are given below:-

● Builds Confidence 

When learners learn phonetics they can themselves decode sounds and their relation to the pronunciation of letters and their combination in words, communication becomes a natural process for them. Even when the words seem to be unfamiliar to them, instead of getting overwhelmed they will be able to associate words with clear conceptualization.

● Helps in Recognition and Interpretation

Be it young learners or adults, once they know how to use phonetics in everyday life they can easily recognise the sound which each letter makes and how they must be pronounced when they are in combination with each other. One of the core objectives of learning phonetics is to make learners capable of interpreting the words even when they listen from a person having a different accent.

● Helps to Spell words correctly

Phonetics not only guides the learner in decording the sound, it also help them to know how a word must be spelt out out while writing. When you spell a word with a phoneme, it is called a Grapheme. Graphemes are the symbols that are used to identify a single phoneme - a letter or group of letters that represent the sound. And effective communication  can only  be completed when learners can use the language appropriately in both reading and writing.

● Improves Fluency

When it comes to the fluency of a speaker, two things matter the most:

  * How fast can a person recognize words!

  * How accurate  the pronunciation  is!

 Phonetics does take care of both. Fluency indicates the 'ease' with which one can read text. Moreover, when learners can decode words it builds a memory dictionary in their minds and with times this helps to build up the comprehension skill within oneself.

CONCLUSION

Teaching pronunciation is always kept in dark. Recently, pronunciation teaching has gained momentum by making some changes in the approaches and techniques of teaching methods. And the article tries to explain how much the instruction of phonetics help the children to improve their fluency in communication. And it emphasizes the need to teach phonetics from the elementary stage for the better acquisition of second language. It of course pointed that pronunciation instruction through phonetics help learners to have a better understanding of the second language and improve their ability to communicate easily and effectively.