An Analysis of the Importance of Phonemes and Phonetic Symbols in English Words

Abstract: The industry of English education is becoming more and more prosperous. However, some teachers neglect the importance of words teaching, especially the importance of phonemes and phonetic symbols. What is worse is that most of them teach English beginning with grammar, which makes the students weary of studying. This paper, aiming to solve the above problems, concentrates on the analysis of the importance of phonemes and phonetic symbols and the process in English words teaching.
　　Key words: phonemes; phonetic symbols; process; English words teaching
　　【中图分类号】G63

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　　Since the 1970s, as a result of the reform-and-open policy, Chinese people show great enthusia in English study. Nevertheless, during their study, most of them ignore two basic concepts--phonemes and phonetic symbols. What`s worse, several teachers also pay little attention to these two concepts. In consequence, many students cannot speak the words correctly and he a very poor vocabulary even when they enter the universities or colleges. As we know, English is phonography, which means that the alphabets also represent speech sounds. In China, many students write pinyin beside an English word to help them memorize the pronunciation . For example, some write kao li zhi when they learn the word college. And they recite it mechanically in that way. Maybe they can know how to read it ,but they don`t understand the essence of the pronunciation of the word. In the long view, that is harmful to the students. Only when we pay special attention to the importance of phonemes and phonetic symbols can we improve the efficiency in English teaching and study.
　　1. The concepts of phonemes and phonetic symbols
　　Phoneme is the allest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, as the m of mat and the b of bat in English. Phonetic symbol is a written character used in phonetic transcription of represent a particular speech sound. A phoneme can be changed into a phonetic symbol if we put / / between a phoneme.
　　2. The procedure of words teaching
　　First, we should teach the phonemes. Whereas, we are supposed to make our students understand that there are more than twenty six phonemes in all for the five vowel alphabets, a e I o u, he many different phonemes. Definitely speaking, there are forty eight phonemes in total, which is in coincide with the number of phonetic symbols. Then, it`s time to teach phonetic symbols. In this period, we must mention that the five vowel alphabets he different phonetic symbols, such as a can be read /ei/ in the word make, but / ?/ in the word bag.
　　3. Examples-compared with traditional ways
　　When we teach the word congratulations, we can do like this: cong-ra-tu-la-tions. This time, we apply phonemes and phonetic symbols to the teaching of the word. On the contrary, we might taught the word like this in traditional ways: read the word for many times-write pinyin beside the word-recite the word. Besides, the way ofmemorizing the word is also different. In tradition, students recite the alphabets one by one and then speak the word; whereas, if we use phonemes and phonetic symbols, they will speak the word at first and then recite the word by syllables.
　　Conclusion:Now we can make sense how to solve the problems in the beginning of the paper. So long as we can positively use the method in our teaching, the efficiency will be improved in great deal. Moreover, I believe that English education in China can be promising although we still he a long way to go.