23. Developing speaking skills

Speech has a set of specific features: motivated character, activity, purposefulness, independence, connection with personality, with communicative thinking, with the situation.

Stages of teaching speech: 1) formation of speaking skills 2 substages: semantization – introduction of lexical units; and automation), 2)improvement of sp. skills (is realized through different forms of communication: monologue, dialogue, polylogue), 3)development of sp. skills (students start expressing their thoughts without preliminary preparation; role play, discussion, spontaneous speech).

Here are some of the micro-skills involved in speaking.

The speaker has to: ▪ pronounce the distinctive sounds of a language clearly enough so that people can distinguish them.▪use stress and rhythmic patterns, and intonation patterns of the language clearly enough so that people can understand what is said.▪use the correct forms of words. ▪put words together in correct word order.▪use vocabulary appropriately.▪use the register or language variety that is appropriate to the situation and the relationship to the conversation partner.▪make clear to the listener the main sentence constituents, such as subject, verb, object, by whatever means the language uses.

24. Semantic structure of a word Structure is the arrangement of ad the relations between the parts of smth complex; a set of interconnected constituents of smth complex. A word is a complex entity, it is composed of: 1)the plane of expression and 2) the plane of content (which may include several meanings). The semantic structures or capacities of words hardly ever coincide. E. g. table is 1. A piece of furniture with a flat top supported by legs; 2. A list of facts, etc (all in all, 5 distinct word-senses). Стол – это 1. Предмет мебели в виде широкой горизонтальной пластины на опорах; 2. Питание, пища; 3. Отделение в учреждение и т.д.

If we analyze all the senses, we will see that only 3 Russian word-senses have their English counterparts. Pride of place in the semantic structure is given to the word-senses which are accepted by native English speakers as the most established, literal and central.

25. The subject-matter of phonetics and phonology

Phonetics is the science that studies the sound matter of language, its semantic functions and lines of development. Phonetics studies the sound system of the language, that is segmental units (phonemes, allophones), suprasegmental units (word stress, syllabic structure, rhythmic organization, intonation). Phonetics can be theoretical and practical. While practical phonetics studies the substance, the material form of phonetic phenomena in relation to meaning, theoretical phonetics is mainly concerned with the functioning of phonetic units in language. All speech sounds have 4 aspects (mechanisms): 1. Articulatoty aspect (Articulation comprises all the movements and positions of the speech organs necessary to produce a speech sound); 2. Acoustic aspect (Speech sound is a physical phenomenon, which exists in the form of sound waves which are pronounced by vibrations of the vocal cords. Thus each sound is characterized by frequency and certain duration. These items represent acoustic aspect); 3. Auditory aspect (The listener hears the sound, percepts its acoustic features and the hearing mechanism selects from the acoustic information what is linguistically important); 4. Functional (linguistic) aspect (Every language unit performs a certain function in actual speech. Functional aspect deals with these functions). In accordance with these 4 aspects of speech sounds 4 branches of phonetics are distinguished: 1) Articulatory phonetics is the study of the way in which the air is set in motion, the movement of the speech organs and the coordination of these movements in the production of single sounds and trains of sounds. 2) Acoustic phonetics studies the way in which the air vibrates between the mouth of the speaker and the ear of the listener. It studies the physical properties of speech sounds such as quantity, timber/voice quality, intensity, the pitch of the voice. 3) Auditory phonetics is the branch of phonetics the main focus of which is on the study of the way people perceive speech sounds. Its interests mainly lie in the sensation of hearing, which is the brain activity.4) Phoneticians are also interested in the way in which sound phenomena function in a particular language and what role they play in manifesting the meaningful distinctions of the language.( they study the abstract side of the sounds of language). The branch of phonetics concerned with the study of the functional or linguistic aspect of speech is called phonology. Phonology studies only those contrasts in sound which make differences of meaning within the language.