Understanding the English Language

By: Fernando Calle

Have you ever heard about phonetics, phonemes, phonics, stress, intonation, enunciation, tone, rhythm ? This may sound a bit complicated to understand but these are very important components of linguistics of the English language. These functions of the language are extremely important for pronunciation, accent reduction, fluency and of course confidence. How can you pronounce a word if you don’t know how it sounds?.

For example, phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing of the English language by developing learners' phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes—in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them.

Ex: Two letters that represent one speech sound. Examples: sh, ch, th, ph. Two letters that together make one vowel sound. Examples: ai, oo, ow.

You also have to be mindful of your enunciation when speaking. Enunciation is the act of pronouncing words. Make sure your enunciation is clear when ordering in a restaurant so you don't get French flies instead of French fries. Enunciation is from the Latin word enuntiationem, meaning “declaration.”

To be frank, a lot of the schools do not offer these services simply because they don’t have the right instructors. Come see us at Cowein if you feel the need to improve your fluency, reduce your accent and better your pronunciation.