Structure and Meaning in English
A Guide for Teachers
Graeme Kennedy
- 408 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Structure and Meaning in English
A Guide for Teachers
Graeme Kennedy
About This Book
Structure and Meaning in English is designed to help teachers of English develop an understanding of those aspects of English which are especially relevant for learners who speak other languages.
Using corpus research, Graeme Kennedy cuts to the heart of what is important in the teaching of English. The book provides pedagogically- relevant information about English at the levels of sounds, words, sentences and texts. It draws attention to those linguistic items and processes which research has shown are typically hard for learners and which lead to errors.
Each chapter contains:
- a description of one or more aspects of English
- an outline of typical errors or problems for learners
- specific learning objectives listed at the beginning of each chapter
- exercises or tasks based on 'real English' taken from newspapers and other sources.
- discussion topics which can be worked through independently either as part of a course, or self study
With answers to many of the tasks given at the back of the book, this groundbreaking work provides a comprehensive and accessible textbook on the structure and use of the language for teachers of English.
Frequently asked questions
Information
- Know what sounds there are in English.
- Be able to use phonemic transcription to show that you know how many sounds there are in particular words, and what those sounds are.
- Be able to show you understand the relationship between letters and sounds.
- Know which are the most frequent sounds and combinations of sounds in English.
- Be able to describe the main processes used in making speech sounds.
- Know the main differences between consonants and vowels.
- Be able to describe how each of the English consonants and vowels is made.
- Know the difference between phonemes and allophones.
- Know how to read the pronunciation information in a dictionary in order to be able to give advice to learners on how particular words are pronounced.
- Be able to show how sounds change in the environment of other sounds.
- Know what the main word stress and sentence stress patterns are in English.
- Know which words receive strong stress in English and which words do not.
- Know what the main intonation patterns of English are and some of the important meanings they can signal.
- Be able to describe some of the important differences between the sounds in different varieties of English (e.g. UK, US, Australian, NZ), which result in different accents.
- Know some of the main difficulties that learners of English from different language backgrounds have with English pronunciation.