I remember the first time I noticed some weird symbols on the little brown pocket English-Spanish Dictionary given to me by my aunt when I was 11 years. A bunch of “reversed letters and numbers” and other kind of signs amazed me, making me wonder about their meaning. As the common dictionaries do, the first pages in my dictionary showed how those symbols work and what they were made for. The author called them “phonetic symbols” and he explained how they had to be pronounced, according to their relation with Spanish sounds. That day, I understood English doesn’t sound in the same way Spanish do, as much as the majority of the people think.
Phonetics actually works with speech sounds, that kind of sounds that people can produce using the vocal tract and can be heard by the ears. That is the game of communication. As Jakobson (1956) said:” We speak to be heard and need to be heard in order to be understood”. Phonetics had no sense if we humans didn’t communicate among us. We are the talkative animals of the planet, so we communicate with others every single day; we are talking and talking every time we want, because communication is part of our primary body functions, part of our own human development. Many of us not even would “exist” without a cellular phone or the internet; that is why communication is the motor of our modern social organization.
As an English and Education student, communication represents the backbone of my career due to English is just a language, a communication code and Education is a profession that uses all the communication features to bring and share knowledge with other people. On the basis of those reasons, I could state communication is very important in my own knowledge achievement process, but there is something else beyond this process: First, the courses of action that occur inside the brain in order to produce the speech sounds that will work in our communication acts. All those neuronal activities involved in the selection of the correct symbols to be arranged to produce a message. It is like to find the symbols into a file box or a computer. Next, all the nerve impulses transmitted by the brain to activate and coordinate the mechanisms and organs involved in the production of sounds. That is when the speech apparatus appears to bring us the show and to let the words fly away through the air on the sound waves. After those events, a listener catches the sound waves; the message arrives to the ears to be transformed in nerve impulses. Secondly, the listener brain starts to find into its own file box to identify the sequence of sounds that the speaker produced just an instant before, while the speaker is also hearing the same sounds produced by himself. They will both understand the sounds after they internally decode the nerve impulses received from the inner ear.
Phonetics studies how those above mentioned sounds are produced. Phonetics needs some related sciences to understand and study the speech processes, for instance: Anatomy, physiology, neurophysiology, physics, psychology, psychoacoustic, etc. Now, computing science is helping phonetics to smooth the progress of some studies by using some techniques of digital processing of acoustic signals. All these sciences all known as Speech Sciences, where phonetics stands at the intersection of all those concerned sciences, related in any way with the study of speech, with no boundaries. Consequently, Phonetics is related to education as another area of Neurosciences, that is, all the sciences related to the study of the brain activities, where phonetics has a lot of work to do.
Likewise, talking in a pragmatic way about English, there is a direct relation between phonetics and ESL. For instance, Professor Hector Palacios from UPEL, states “If you don’t know how a word is pronounced, please don’t utter it” The main reason stands on the way as our own ears catch the same sound waves we produced at first. Due to the comprehension is based on the listening; it works on the GIGO computing principle: Garbage in, Garbage out. If you send garbage to your brain, your brain will take revenge in your mouth. If you mispronounce a word, you have a high chance to say it in a wrong way the most of the future cases. This is a rule that must be observed in any moment if anybody wants to be a reputable English teacher. If he or she doesn’t want, he or she must go immediately to the Studies Control Office to ask for another career.
In the same way, a correct use of features of phonetics will help our English Language proficiencies to increase highly. For instance, Orthology defines how a specific language must be pronounced, so we are able to obtain a correct pronunciation of English if we pay attention to those rules. Another branch of phonetics studies the interesting history of language: Diachronic and Synchronic Phonetics (Llisterri, 2005) show us how English was developed until our days and how the sounds were described in a specific period of time, respectively. I am deeply convinced that one of the more interesting features of phonetics is seeing all the gestures made with the mouth when the correct pronunciation is intended to be shown. It is way too soon to say how far will the studies about phonetics go; I know I’m supposed to find more applications for it as a future English teacher, but I hope that the most of my classmates and the whole generation of students of English in UPEL were interested in a good pronunciation, the structure of the speech sounds and other features of phonetics. But above all this, I hope that phonetics worked for them in the same way that it works for me.
Phonetics actually works with speech sounds, that kind of sounds that people can produce using the vocal tract and can be heard by the ears. That is the game of communication. As Jakobson (1956) said:” We speak to be heard and need to be heard in order to be understood”. Phonetics had no sense if we humans didn’t communicate among us. We are the talkative animals of the planet, so we communicate with others every single day; we are talking and talking every time we want, because communication is part of our primary body functions, part of our own human development. Many of us not even would “exist” without a cellular phone or the internet; that is why communication is the motor of our modern social organization.
As an English and Education student, communication represents the backbone of my career due to English is just a language, a communication code and Education is a profession that uses all the communication features to bring and share knowledge with other people. On the basis of those reasons, I could state communication is very important in my own knowledge achievement process, but there is something else beyond this process: First, the courses of action that occur inside the brain in order to produce the speech sounds that will work in our communication acts. All those neuronal activities involved in the selection of the correct symbols to be arranged to produce a message. It is like to find the symbols into a file box or a computer. Next, all the nerve impulses transmitted by the brain to activate and coordinate the mechanisms and organs involved in the production of sounds. That is when the speech apparatus appears to bring us the show and to let the words fly away through the air on the sound waves. After those events, a listener catches the sound waves; the message arrives to the ears to be transformed in nerve impulses. Secondly, the listener brain starts to find into its own file box to identify the sequence of sounds that the speaker produced just an instant before, while the speaker is also hearing the same sounds produced by himself. They will both understand the sounds after they internally decode the nerve impulses received from the inner ear.
Phonetics studies how those above mentioned sounds are produced. Phonetics needs some related sciences to understand and study the speech processes, for instance: Anatomy, physiology, neurophysiology, physics, psychology, psychoacoustic, etc. Now, computing science is helping phonetics to smooth the progress of some studies by using some techniques of digital processing of acoustic signals. All these sciences all known as Speech Sciences, where phonetics stands at the intersection of all those concerned sciences, related in any way with the study of speech, with no boundaries. Consequently, Phonetics is related to education as another area of Neurosciences, that is, all the sciences related to the study of the brain activities, where phonetics has a lot of work to do.
Likewise, talking in a pragmatic way about English, there is a direct relation between phonetics and ESL. For instance, Professor Hector Palacios from UPEL, states “If you don’t know how a word is pronounced, please don’t utter it” The main reason stands on the way as our own ears catch the same sound waves we produced at first. Due to the comprehension is based on the listening; it works on the GIGO computing principle: Garbage in, Garbage out. If you send garbage to your brain, your brain will take revenge in your mouth. If you mispronounce a word, you have a high chance to say it in a wrong way the most of the future cases. This is a rule that must be observed in any moment if anybody wants to be a reputable English teacher. If he or she doesn’t want, he or she must go immediately to the Studies Control Office to ask for another career.
In the same way, a correct use of features of phonetics will help our English Language proficiencies to increase highly. For instance, Orthology defines how a specific language must be pronounced, so we are able to obtain a correct pronunciation of English if we pay attention to those rules. Another branch of phonetics studies the interesting history of language: Diachronic and Synchronic Phonetics (Llisterri, 2005) show us how English was developed until our days and how the sounds were described in a specific period of time, respectively. I am deeply convinced that one of the more interesting features of phonetics is seeing all the gestures made with the mouth when the correct pronunciation is intended to be shown. It is way too soon to say how far will the studies about phonetics go; I know I’m supposed to find more applications for it as a future English teacher, but I hope that the most of my classmates and the whole generation of students of English in UPEL were interested in a good pronunciation, the structure of the speech sounds and other features of phonetics. But above all this, I hope that phonetics worked for them in the same way that it works for me.
Very Interesting, indeed.
ReplyDelete