INTRODUCTION

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 512.

LESSON I

The purpose of the present course is to help the students to develop their own pronunciation habits.

It's a big mistake to underestimate the importance of pronunciation. If you want to communicate in English, you need to speak English. Speaking to people is the only way to communicate. Well, you can exchange written messages, of course. Or use gestures to show what you want to say. But seriously, you need to know how to pronounce what you want to say. How you say things is as important as what you say. It means that it is necessary for you to acquire correct, standard English pronunciation if you want to understand English speakers and want them to understand you.

The course is based on the type of English pronunciation which is known as “Received Pronunciation” (RP) Литературное английское произношение

The term was introduced by Professor D.Jones. D.Jones points out that RP is easily understood in all the English – speaking countries: the Unites States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. This type of English pronunciation is adopted as the teaching norm in the schools and higher educational institutions.

Received or Standard pronunciation consists of:

Correct pronunciation of sounds;

Correct pronunciation of words, with special attention to stress;

Standard intonation in sentences, which includes such notions as sentence stress, rhythm, rising and falling intonation.

In the section Phonetics, we will study standard or Received English pronunciation: sounds, stress, rhythm, intonation, and other useful things.

English pronunciation is very different from Russian pronunciation. The number of letters and the sounds that they represent are not the same in English and Russian, and some English sounds do not have corresponding sounds in Russian.

English stress and rhythm are particularly difficult for Russian speakers. Even advanced students often have difficulties in mastering English sentence stress and speech rhythm, which are necessary to master if you want to achieve a good level of language fluency in English.

One and the same vowel sound may be represented in writing by different vowel letters and their combinations.

For example, all these words have the same vowel sound [ei]: lake, wait, play, eight, they, steak.

At the same time, one and the same vowel letter or letter combination can represent different vowel sounds.

For example, the letter combination "ou" represents the sound [u:] in "group", [au] in "out", [o:] in "bought, four", and [ᴧ] in "trouble, tough".

A - hat [hæt], hate [heit], [wɔʧ], all [ɔːl], father ['fɑːðə], art [ɑːt], any ['eni], about [ə'baut]

Some words can have the same spelling but different pronunciation, for example:

I like to read [ri:d].

I have read [red] that book.

Some words have different spelling but the same pronunciation, for example:

I have read [red] that book.

My favourite colour is red [red].