Reflection Topic 2: Introduction to phonology

For this topic, we had study about speech organ and English sounds. Now I have understood three important parts in this topic which are phonetics, phonetic script and phonemes. Phonetics is the study of sounds made by humans when they talk while the phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a language which carries distinctive meaning.

The most important part that I learn in this topic is the speech organ involved when we produced sounds to make a speech. There are 15 speech organs were involved when we speak. If one of our speech organ did not function well, it will absolutely affects our speech. For example is if we don't have front teeth, then, it will be very difficult for us to say words with s.

http://www.barcode.ro/tutorials/biometrics/img/speech-production.jpg

From the speech organs, we can produce 3 sounds which are initiation, phonation and articulation.

Speech production	Description
Initiation	· The production of any speech sound requires the creation of an air stream in vocal tract. Te air stream is initiated by the lungs
Phonation	· As the airstream passes through the larynx, it is modified by the vocal cords, through the introduction of voice. · When the vocal cords are brought together, airs passing out of the lungs cause them to vibrate and voice is produced. If the vocal cords are pulled back, they cannot vibrate. These sounds are called voiceless.
Articulation	· As the air stream passes through the vocal tract, it may be modified by the movement of the active articulators obstructing its passage through the vocal tract to varying degrees. · The obstruction of the air stream may occur at any point in the point in the vocal tract and is the result of the active articulators moving towards a passive articulator

English sounds can be divided into two parts, vowel/diphthong sounds and consonant sounds.

Consonant can be divided into two parts, voice consonants and voiceless consonants. Voiced consonants are produced when the vocal cords are held tightly so that the air stream vibrates them. But for voiceless consonants, there is no vibration at the vocal cords.

For vowels, it is actually a sound without detectable change in quality from beginning to end. It results from changing the shape and the position of tongue and lips. The sounds are produced here there is no friction or stoppage of air. Vowels can also be divided into two types which are simple vowels/ monophthongs and diphthongs.

For our activity in ISL, we had done minimal pairs tongue twister. We had gone through so much obstacles while selecting the tongue twister and doing the minimal pairs for initial, medial and final. as for me, it is not easy to find the correct words for three categories of the minimal pairs where we have to refer to the dictionary for so many times to make sure that the answer is correct.

While learning all of this, I have realized how importance the pronunciations in English are. As a teacher, it is very important to be a good role models for pronunciation because children learn pronunciation by imitation.