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Friday, July 04, 2008

From Phonics to Phonetics

Phonics has gained certain popularity in kids English Education, while phonetics is an academic subject in a college as a part of linguistics. We, high school English teachers, are to bridge Phonics and Phonetics.
"Was gross ist am Menschen, das ist, dass er eine Brücke und kein Zweck ist:" (http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8zara10.txt) ["What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end:"(Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann trans., "Thus Spoke Zarathustra --- A Book for None and All", 1954, New York, USA, p.15)]
It is an honor of us, high school teachers, to be a bridge.
Just teaching phonetics after the classes of phonics might not bridge the two. We need a special technique or two.
S High School has a history of teaching phonics, in LR Listening 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 booklet might 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 as a bridge from phonics to phonetics.

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