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Unit 13 focuses on pronunciation, specifically stress, rhythm, and intonation. Pronunciation is often ignored in ESL classes because native speakers find it too difficult to teach and explain, however, many students see pronunciation equally important to learning the language but struggle with it greatly. Correct pronunciation helps students sound more natural and fluent. Intonation is the variation in volume and pitch in sentences and carries emotions and feelings a speaker wants to convey. Unit 13 illustrates three basic intonation patterns of English: rise/fall, fall/rise, and level pattern. It also provides techniques for teaching intonation, such as gesturing, humming/singing, and using the board. Stress placement can change the meaning of a sentence. Only syllables can be stressed, not individual sounds. Longer words may have a secondary stress, but there can only be one main stressed syllable. Only the most important syllables in the words of a sentence that convey essential information are stressed, the rest of the words are unstressed. Unit 13 provides a chart providing some of the common rules of stress in English. Techniques for teaching stress are demonstrating words with contrastive stress, using gestures, choral work, using the board, or providing stress marks. When speaking naturally, a lot of sounds blend and join together. The four major ways of sound joining are linking, sound dropping, sound changing, and extra lettering. Students often have a difficult time with spelling because the spelling of words and their pronunciation often differs in English. Unit 13 introduces the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It then goes over articulation and some linguistic features of English. It reviews the Place of Articulation (where in the mouth the sound is made) of sounds in English: velar, palatal, palatal-alveolar, alveolar, dental, labio-dental, bilabial, and glottal. It also reviews the Manner of Articulation (how the sounds are made): plosive/stop, fricative, nasal, lateral, affricate, and approximant. Some methods for teaching articulation of individual sounds are peer dictation, emphasizing words with your own mouth, visuals, phonemes, and tongue twisters.
