Ivakhnenko o.A.

(Vinnytsya)

Priorities for phonology in the pronunciation class

Here are some of the main criteria:

Comprehensible: are learners able to identify the sounds and are their articulations understood by native speakers?

Social Acceptability: are learners producing sounds that are aesthetically acceptable to the ears of native speakers?

Ease of Production: do learners have a good chance of successfully learning to produce the sounds?

Number of familiar words (functional load): do the sounds occur frequently in essential or very useful words?

Likely to be a bad habit affecting other sounds: are errors getting in the way of other important targets?

The consonant contrasts affect many common English words, so poor production of these sounds will be noticeable. Teaching should focus on both recognition and production.

Language is a means of communication. Teachers must understand the physical aspects of sound production.

Teachers will not necessarily teach these to students, but this knowledge will provide a basis for teachers to identify the physical reasons for inaccurate approximations of foreign language sounds, enabling them to give precise instructions which will help students correct faulty pronunciation. Unless teachers understand how students are using their speech organs in producing a native language sound and what they should be doing to reproduce the foreign language sound acceptably, teachers will not be able to help students. Incorrectly articulated consonants will affect the production of vowels, as vowels will affect consonants. Students therefore require steady practice and muscle training. Pronunciation is a motor skill that needs practice.

Strilchuk Antonina

(Vinnytsia)

The linguocognitive implications of teaching english phraseologisms to ukrainian-speaking students

Phraseology is a branch of lexicology, which is concerned with the study and systematic description of phraseological units (PhUs). Traditionally phraseologisms are defined as stable lexical units, equivalent to a word whose meaning cannot be deduced from the meanings of their components. Therefore they are considered to be arbitrary and can only be memorized by EFL learners in the course of learning English. However a new approach to the study of PhUs is emerging within the field of cognitive linguistics which is concerned with the mechanisms of the linguistic units’ formation in reference to the work of human mind.

One of the issues in cognitive linguistics crucial for the study of phraseological units is that of motivation, or iconicity, the similarity or analogy between the form of a sign and its meaning (Dirven, Verspoor). In linguocognitive terms phraseologisms are viewed as motivated lexical units whose collocational behaviour is not arbitrary (Walker 2008). Thus teaching PhUs should be aimed not at their rote learning but focus more on their semantics. The mechanism which can account for the meaning of phraseological units is metaphor which is interpreted in cognitive semantics as a conceptual structure formed by means of mapping or projecting the entities from the source domain (the domain in terms of which the target is described) onto the entities of the target domain (the domain being described). For instance, if we analyse the meaning of the phraseological unit to play second fiddle ‘have a subordinate role to someone or something; be treated as less important than someone or something’ the source domain will be constituted by the entities referring to the sphere of music, namely the orchestra, where the first fiddle takes a leading position, and therefore the second has a subordinate role. These entities are projected onto the sphere of human beings which constitutes the target domain. Thus the phraseological unit to play second fiddle activates in the learner’s mind the conceptual metaphor HUMAN BEINGS ARE INSTRUMENTS in terms of which we understand its meaning.

Thus, the implementation of linguocognitive analysis in the EFL classroom will facilitate the learning of phraseological units by means of revealing the underlying linguistic and cognitive mechanisms of their formation and functioning .

Tripses J.

(Southeast Missouri University)