The role of phonetic drills in teaching pronunciation and intonation.
Any language has its specific phonic system. This is true for English as well. The sounds of English are not the same as the sounds of Russian or Kazakh, though there are, of course, some sounds which occur both in English and in native language. There are many difficult sounds in English for pupils, [w], [ð], [θ], [r], [ə:], [ou], [εa] for example. To pupils the combination of sounds [θs], [ðz] which occurs in English at the end of a word (months, clothes) is strange and they find great difficulty in pronouncing a word with this sound combination. The same may be said about the sound [ŋ]. In English it comes in the middle or at the end of many words: English, think, song, sitting, longer and presents a lot of trouble to pupils to produce it correctly as there is no sound like this in the native language.
English consonants also present some trouble to pupils, first because there are sounds which are quite strange to pupils, for example, [ð], [θ], [w], [h], then because their pronunciation changes depending on the position in the words. In final position voiceless consonants have strong articulation (white), voiced consonants – weak articulation (wide). Consonants may vary in length. In this connection D. Jones writes that when final they may be observed to be longer after short vowels than they are after long vowels... The [n] in bent is much shorter than that in bend; the [l] in gulp is shorter than that in bulb. The teacher of English should know this to be able to help his pupils in pronouncing words as close to the pattern as possible.
The pronunciation of words is not only a matter of sounds, but also of stress or accent. Some words have the heavier stress on the first part of the word: sorry, evening, morning, answer, and other words have the heavier stress on the second part: begin, mistake, about, reduce, result, occur, effect. Stress is very important to the assimilation of English pronunciation. Foreigners often find it difficult to understand an Englishman's speech and ask him to speak more slowly, because in quick speech the accented syllables are so strong that they almost drown the others.
The pronunciation of sentence patterns includes also variations of musical tones: rise and fall. English tone patterns differ from those of native language that is why pupils find it difficult to use adequate tone patterns in conversation or while reading aloud. Sometimes people speaking English use wrong intonation because of the interference of the mother tongue. That often leads to misunderstanding and impoliteness. For example, 'Will you 'wait for me `here? (Подождите меня здесь.) is not only a wrong tone-pattern, but is impolite in its form. In teaching English pronunciation the teacher should bear in mind that the difficulties he will meet with - and they occur throughout the course - are sounds, stress, and musical tones strange to our pupils. He should know what they are and how to teach pupils to overcome these difficulties.
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