PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
Segmental Aspects

Pronunciation undoubtedly causes numerous problems to people learning English as a foreign language. In spite of the fact that many methods, strategies, approaches and applications have been developed to improve non-native speaker pronunciation, the importance of teaching, training, and testing pronunciation is still often neglected and underestimated in education. It is mandatory for everyone to be aware of the fact that communication fails if the words pronounced incorrectly are incomprehensible. On the other hand, not only students may have problems with intelligibility of pronunciation. Teachers should also be educated properly to be good pronunciation models for their students, to help them in developing adequate communicative competence.

The publication is primarily intended as an educational material for the students of the Extended Studies specialising in the English Language and in Literature who aim to work as English teachers in their professional career, but it is hoped, that it will also be found helpful by all the English language students, as well as by wider academic community.

This textbook entitled Phonetics and Phonology. Segmental Aspects, presents key information about the pronunciation of segmental aspects of English phonetics and phonology with focus on the selected contrastive details concerning British English, American English with comparisons to the situation in the Slovak language. The publication provides not only a theoretical outline of the main topics within Phonetics and Phonology, but it also comprises practical exercises. The objective of the theoretical part is to prepare the core information background for completing different types of practical pronunciation tasks included in the second part of the textbook.

The first chapter is intended to serve as a general introduction to the subject, presenting the information about phonetics and phonology, as well as the basic units of these two linguistic disciplines. The second chapter deals with the issues of transcription, introducing the special symbols of the phonetic alphabet which represent speech sounds. The third chapter of the theoretical part is concerned with the articulatory organs and the process of phonation. Chapter four deals with British English, American English and the Slovak language contrastively, and chapter five analyses the similarities and the differences in their phonemic inventories. While the sixth chapter is aimed at the issues of vowels, the seventh chapter looks at the aspects of consonants. Chapter eight introduces the topics within phonetic iconicity, and chapter nine discusses the area of speech intelligibility, as well as the characteristic features of language, speech and communication. As the textbook is primarily constructed for future teachers of English, the tenth, i.e. the last chapter, offers useful advice, as well as practical material with recommendations targeting teaching English as a foreign language.

It is my hope that the students and the other users will find this textbook helpful and beneficial not only for studying the theoretical background, but will also enjoy a chance for exercising and reinforcing their knowledge of the linguistic aspects of the sound level by doing the practical tasks and exercises.