VOWELS, CONSONANTS AND SYLLABLES IN ENGLISH

VOWELS, CONSONANTS AND SYLLABLES IN ENGLISH:

English Teaching Perspective

David S Taylor
School of Education
University of Leeds
source: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/

Abstract

The terms vowel, consonant, and syllable are crucial in all discussions of English pronunciation. Despite this, the meaning of these terms is often not clear. In particular, it is frequently unclear whether they are being used in a phonetic or a phonological sense. Both phonetically and phonologically there are problems of definition. This paper explores the meaning of these terms, and points out that, as teachers of English, we can only make sense of the phenomena to which these terms refer if we take into account both the phonetic and the phonological aspects, while at the same time carefully distinguishing between them.
    Discussions of English pronunciation, particularly from a teaching and learning point of view, often suffer from a failure to distinguish sufficiently between phonetics and phonology and to consider the relation between the two. For example, the well-known vowel and consonant charts reproduced in most treatments of English pronunciation often do not make it clear whether the sounds referred to are phonetic or phonological entities. In the British and European tradition there has perhaps been a tendency to adopt a too phonetically-oriented approach, while the American tradition has perhaps paid too much attention to phonology (see Taylor 1994). Yet it is obvious that most phenomena we come across in dealing with English pronunciation can only be properly understood with reference to both phonetics and phonology. Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of vowels, consonants and syllables. It is the intention in this paper to explore these problematic terms and what they refer to from the point of view of what English teachers need to know about them.

The terms vowel and consonant are fairly familiar, and probably anyone who can read and write has come across them. This very familiarity is in itself a problem, however, because we all tend to assume that we know what vowels and consonants are. But when we come to consider the matter more closely we quickly realize that this is far from being the case. This can easily be shown by asking an English speaker, How many vowels there are in English? By far the commonest response to this question is 'five'. A moment's reflection, however, will show that the matter is by no means as straightforward as this. It is clear that the answer 'five' refers to the vowel letters of the Roman alphabet used to write English. It is equally clear that there are more than five vowel sounds in English.

Here then is a first difficulty. In common use and understanding the terms vowel and consonant tend to refer to the letters of the alphabet, in other words to writing. The letters do of course represent sounds, but not in any straightforward way, as can be seen from the fact that we have only five vowel letters to represent about twenty English vowel sounds. In talking about vowels and consonants, therefore, we must first be careful to distinguish clearly between sounds and letters, and between speaking and writing

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آموزش لهجه آمریکایی، American Accent Traning

In American English, words are not pronounced one by one. Usually, the end of one word attaches to the beginning of the next word. This is also true for initials, numbers, and spelling. Part of the glue that connects sentences is an underlying hum or drone that only breaks when you come to a period, and sometimes not even then. You have this underlying hum in your own language and it helps a great deal toward making you sound like a native speaker.

Once you have a strong intonation, you need to connect all those stairsteps together so that each sentence sounds like one long word.

 
The dime.
The dime easier.
They tell me the dime easier.
They tell me the dime easier to understand.
They tell me that I'm easier to understand.

 
The last two sentences above should be pronounced exactly the same, no matter how they are written. It is the sound that is important, not the spelling

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