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THEME 2 DEVELOPING ORAL SKILLS // ENGLISH LANGUAGE PHONETICS - DEVELOPING ORAL SKILLS **HOW WE LEARN A LANGUAGE** **CHOMSKY** **Language Acquisition Device** The Language Acquisition Device, or LAD, is part of Chomsky's acquisition hypothesis. The LAD is a system of principles that children are born with that help them learn language, and accounts for the order in which children learn structures, and mistakes they make as they learn. Second language learning theory proposes that acquisition is possible in second and subsequent languages, and that learning programmes have to create the conditions for it.

Example One piece of evidence for existence of a LAD is the fact that phisical areas of the brain concerned with production and comprejension have been identified. In the classroom The belief that acquisition is possible lies at the heart of any method that involves engaging the learner in natural communication and authentic input, these include task-based learning, CLIL, and some story- and activity-based programmes. - ENGLISH LANGUAGE PHONETICS **SUPRASEGMENTAL FEATURES ** In linguistics, prosody refers to intonation, rhythm, and vocal stress in speech. The prosodic features of a unit of speech, whether a syllable, word, phrase, or clause, are called suprasegmental features because they affect all the segments of the unit. These suprasegmental features are manifested, among other things, as syllable length, tone, and stress. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">Phrases and clauses are grammatical concepts, but they may have prosodic equivalents, commonly called prosodic units, intonation units, or declination units, which are the actual phonetic spurts or chunks of speech, and which may exist as a hierarchy of levels. Such units are characterized by several phonetic cues, such as a coherent pitch contour, and the gradual decline in pitch and lengthening of vowels over the duration of the unit, until the pitch and speed are reset to begin the next unit. Breathing, both inhalation and exhalation, only seems to occur at these boundaries. <span style="color: #ff7d00; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; text-align: justify;">**Tone** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #555555; display: block; font-family: tahoma,'Bitstream Vera Sans','Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',lucida,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">A contrastive pitch of syllables in which conveys part of meaning of a word. In languages such as Mandarin, the pronunciation of two words may be the same except the pitch difference. For example, [ma] pronounced with a high-level tone means "mother", and with a high falling tone means "scold". In Cantonese, [ma] produced with a high-level tone means "mother" too, but with a low-mid to mid rising tone means "a horse". Click here to see more Cantonese tone example. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #555555; display: block; font-family: tahoma,'Bitstream Vera Sans','Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',lucida,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"> <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #555555; display: block; font-family: tahoma,'Bitstream Vera Sans','Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',lucida,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #ff7d00; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">**Intonation:** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #555555; display: block; font-family: tahoma,'Bitstream Vera Sans','Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',lucida,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">Intonation, in linguistics, is the variation of pitch when speaking. Intonation and stress are two main elements of linguistic prosody. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #555555; display: block; font-family: tahoma,'Bitstream Vera Sans','Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',lucida,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">Many languages use pitch syntactically, for instance to convey surprise and irony or to change a statement to a question. Such languages are called intonation languages. English and French are well-known examples. Some languages use pitch to distinguish words; these are known as tonal languages. Thai and Hausa are examples. An intermediate position is occupied by languages with tonal word accent, for instance Norwegian or Japanese. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #555555; display: block; font-family: tahoma,'Bitstream Vera Sans','Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',lucida,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">The use of varying pitch to convey meaning. If the same utterences are produced with different intonation, the meaning conveyed will be different. For example, in English, the utterence it is a cat will be regarded as a statement when there is a fall in pitch, and the utterence will be regarded as a question if the pitch rises. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #555555; display: block; font-family: tahoma,'Bitstream Vera Sans','Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',lucida,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"> <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Statment: <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #555555; display: block; font-family: tahoma,'Bitstream Vera Sans','Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',lucida,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">It is a cat. (pitch falls) <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Question: <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #555555; display: block; font-family: tahoma,'Bitstream Vera Sans','Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',lucida,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #000000; display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 14px; text-align: justify;">It is a cat? (pitch rises) <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #555555; display: block; font-family: tahoma,'Bitstream Vera Sans','Trebuchet MS','Lucida Grande',lucida,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12px; text-align: left;"> <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;"><span style="color: #00ff00; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">Rising intonation means the pitch of voice increases over time; falling intonation means that pitch decreases with time.

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;"><span style="color: #00ff00; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">A dipping intonation: falls and then rises, whereas a peaking intonation rises and then falls.

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;">We have practised all this theory, and we can see it in this video. A teacher starts to sing the "Clean up" song in order to make students clean up the classroom. It's an instructional song and so the stressed words are the action verbs. In every "clean", we can see how intonation rises and it makes very meaningful to children, who start to sing or just hum it, that means they understand it.

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive;"> media type="youtube" key="1b4gSs0KhIU?version=3" height="324" width="576" align="center"