SAINT JOSEPH’S COLLEGE OF BAGGAO, INC.

TEACHER EDUCATION 1

The Importance of Phonetics to the Development of English

Grammar among the Grade 7 Students of SJCBI

Chapter 1

Introduction and Its Background

The English language has a feature called phonetics

that enables us to comprehend the sounds of other

alphabets. We learn how an alphabet should sound with the

aid of phonetics. Our tongue motions, vocal cord

movement, lip movements, and even our breath all affect

how a word should sound.

Phonetic provides a valuable way of opening our ears to

facets of language that we tend to understand by

reference to their written rather than their actual

spoken forms. It is a transcribe word or an utterance, we

give a direct specification of its pronunciation.

Teaching English Phonetics is now basic. Not only the

ESL teachers are into teaching phonetics, but for young

learners, phonetics is essential to language learning.

Phonetics is defined as "The branch of linguistics that

deals with the sounds of speech and their production,

combination, description, and representation by written

symbols." Phonetics study is meant for the understanding

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TEACHER EDUCATION 2

of the technique in which syllables and words are

pronounced in various languages all over the world. A

phonetics course for teachers helps a teacher to

understand the root cause of the mispronunciation like

probable misdirection of tongue and promptly and

efficiently, correct it in a student, thereby, making the

procedure faster and more efficient.

This decomposition of pronunciation into different

components is motivated by one simple reason, namely, to

make the teaching of pronunciation an easy, manageable

task. Throughout the history of language teaching, some

teachers asked whether pronunciation could or needed to

be taught and others dropped its teaching from their

syllabi. Teachers stared to adopt the “listen and repeat”

approach. This approach focused on habit-information

whereby the teacher pronounced isolated words to the

students to repeat and the more repetition/imitation was

reinforced, the more students would become accurate.

The use of phonetics in English learning can be

considered a recent trend. Both for young learners and

ESL learners, phonetics is a must-have in the curriculum.

Learning phonetics helps in recognizing both familiar and

unfamiliar sounds, improves pronunciation skills, and

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TEACHER EDUCATION 3

develops autonomy in words and sound recognition. While

it is integral to teach the pronunciation for effective

communication, students need to know the reason why

sounds are important and how they can impact while they

communicate. Both reception and production of the sound

are equally important. To simplify, applying phonetics

for language learning can help eliminate the confusion in

pronunciation and it can also facilitate to grasp stress

and inotation of sound which are major components of

pronunciation. When learners by themselves can 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

unfamiliar to them, instead of getting overwhelmed they

will be able to associate words with clear

conceptualization. Young learners or adults, once they

know how to use phonetics in everyday life, they can

easily recognize the sound 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. Phonetics not only guides the learner in decoding

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TEACHER EDUCATION 4

the sound, it also helps them to know how a word must be

spelt out while writing.

The grade 7 students of SJCBI are said to have

difficulties in spelling and pronunciation of English

words. Developing their phonetics can be of great help in

addressing this phenomenon. We, the researchers come up

with a study to help the Grade 7 students of SJCBI in

developing their English grammar specially in using the

Phonetic. For we all know that Grammar and vocabulary are

key concepts of effective Communication but without the

ability to pronun

Statement of the Problem

Significance of the Study

Teachers.

Parents.
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TEACHER EDUCATION 5

School Administrators.

Curriculum Makers.

Researchers.

Future Researchers.

Scope and Delimitation

Definition of terms