Computer-Assisted Language Learning Class and its Content-Based “Textbook”

---From Pronunciation to Verbal Expression---
Sumiyoshi High School has Computer-Assisted Language Learning Class for the first graders. Students study phonics, recitation, and debate in the class. Phonics enables the students to pronounce English words better, and gives them the literacy to guess the pronunciation of words from their spellings. Phonics also gives them a good base to understand phonemes, which can lead to the understanding of phonological signs. The understanding of phonemes is the subject of phonemics. Phonemics is in turn, in one sense, a field of phonetics, which includes the pronunciation of sentences as well as words and phrases.
In practical phonetics, students are to learn sentence stress, pause, tone, and stress-timed rhythm, often in unmarked or neutral sentences. Those grammatical rules of phonetics, for the unmarked or neutral sentences, are often overruled by attitudinal factors. The attitudinal factors are generated by the contents of a text. Recitation of famous speeches gives the students a good chance to master the attitudinally effected pronunciation of texts, that is, verbal expression.
Sumiyoshi High School has a history of teaching phonics, in CALL Class. In the class, paper-based teaching materials have been handed out in each period. Having all the teaching materials combined and published in a form of a textbook will make the first step toward the more sophisticated procedure of teaching English pronunciation.
The first step surely would lead us to the next, the research and development of pronunciation teaching techniques which will lead to verbal expression with contents.