G'day mate. How are things going? Today, I am going to talk about why correction of pronunciation leads to remarkable improvement in listening. Some people tend to underestimate or even ignore the paramount importance of refining pronunciation. You will unfortunately never understand and realise how remarkably you are going to develop your listening skills until you put every effort into correcting your pronunciation. Why? Let's discuss what some benefits are.
You will be able to hear and catch the point of what an audiotext is about in more detail if you could pronounce the 44 sounds (20 vowels and 24 consonants) correctly
Pronunciation is critical to the development of your listening skills. If you can pronounce each vowel and consonant accurately, then you won't miss out catching words that you are listening. But of course there are some exceptions such as too strong accents, speakers' mispronunciation, too rapid speech, etc. Apart from these, I don't think you are going to struggle to understand. At least, you will feel tremendous relief from the fact that you could get a big picture of what the speaker is talking about.
- You will be able to care about more details of connected speech such as Assimilation, Elision, Catenation, Intrusion
Having refined your pronunciation, there will have more benefits of understanding how words are lost and linked together in various ways to enable us to articulate with minimal oral movement. To put it simply, when you are refining pronunciation, you are simultaneously learning as to how vowels and consonants are mixed together within English sentences, and how they are sounded out in a more natural way. For instance, please read the below sentence in a correct way:
- an intelligent elephant
- an overweight uncle
- It's too expensive
- I'll stay a week
Did you get it how they are lost and linked together?
You will be able to boost your vocabularies much easier and quicker if you've learnt words from their sounds
If you are learning English words from only meanings, spellings and definitions from vocabulary lists, then it's going to be much harder to get used to them. This is because that you haven't understood the words by phonetic symbols do mean you can't pronounce them, nor can you use them in writing and speaking as a more practical setting. Correction of pronunciation immensely helps increase your English words in a more natural way. You can learn them within audiotexts, books, articles, magazines, etc. Learning new words from vocabulary lists sounds really boring and tedious, so you should prioritise correction of pronunciation first, which boosts your listening skills spectacularly.
You will be able to clearly comprehend not just overall contents but also even articles and prepositions
Good pronunciation enables us to catch a significance of what speakers are talking about. Particularly, articles and prepositions are often the key to understanding what is about. Conversely, you will have more possibilities to miss out key contents due largely to lack of the precision of your pronunciation. Even 'the'/ ðiː sound is crucially important for boosting your listening skills. If you can't pronounce 'th-fricative sound accurately, then you are going to be trouble in listening. Someone might pronounce this as 'd' or 'z' sounds. You can hardly refine 'th'-fricative and non-fricative sound overnight, but it might take a bit longer than you reckon, depending upon the precision of your other key consonant sounds.
That's all for today. Much appreciated!
Have a great day!