Phonetics and Phonology

Teaching pronunciation has witnessed a considerable amount of changes in both approaches and
techniques. Since the traditional approaches is rising to language teaching, the teaching pronunciation
has increase, but with the increased focus on the learner in learner-centered approaches. It has
resulted that in pronunciation mainly being linked to listening and speaking. The role of phonetics and
phonology is important we should not deny it, because the more students are aware of these branches
of study, the more they will become aware about the language target and also the more they are
motivate to achieve a native-like pronunciation.

The easiest way to show the difference between phonetics and phonology is that, phonetics is the
study of human mouth can make of possible sounds and human ear can hear over all languages while
phonology is the study of those same sounds within individual languages. Phonology is mostly all that
matters, when studying particular language. Comparison between languages brings out the phonetics.
English is a non-tonal language. To distinguish word meaning the tone language pitch is used. A word
said with high pitch may have a different meaning than the same word said with a low pitch. In English,
changes in pitch are used to emphasize or express emotion, not to give a different word meaning to the
sound. It is not surprising that native speakers of tone languages often have strong accents when
speaking English. While the Philippines is already recognized worldwide as one of the top English-
speaking communities in Asia, there are still some Pinoys who are prone to using words or sentences
that mean something else to native English speakers. A simple message can be expressed clearly with
American or British English speakers by learning and understanding the basics of how to communicate
just like a native English speaker. Producing a consonant involves making the vocal tract narrower at
some location than it usually is. We call this narrowing a constriction. Which consonant you're
pronouncing depends on where in the vocal tract the constriction is and how narrow it is. It also
depends on a few other things, such as whether the vocal folds are vibrating and whether air is flowing
through the nose.

The relevance of phonology and phonetics is to master the sound of English language, because
English language sound is differing with other language.If English is your native language, or you learned
it as an additional language, it is possible that you may not be aware of the structure of its sounds. It is
important to know the phonetics since the phonology is about study of the sound and also phonology
will help us to have better pronunciation in english. Phonetics and phonology is not only important
because it deal with the pronunciations but by learning phonetic and phonology it may avoid some
misunderstanding while communicating with each other.