Week Seven Assignment Two

The Sounds of Speech

Pretest: 7/10                Post test: 10/10

            My nephew has speech therapy once or twice a week. It was great to learn about how much affects our ability to produce and interpret sounds. There are approximately 42-44 speech sounds in the English language. I think the scientists in this case should exclude the accents because if we took the accents of different backgrounds we would probably have over 60 speech sounds. The sounds of speech are known as phonemes. They are represented by a separation like “/   /” This helps educators enforce the strict sound to help students learn to listen to the language. It was interesting to know that phonemes are the smallest part of speech language.

            I would like to know how teachers, mainly speech teachers, help improve students’ speech. With the idea of accents and different ways of saying things I find it hard to understand how speech can be assessed. How can we tell a child from a Russian background that he is mispronouncing words when it is just the way he talks? Do we have just reason to believe that there is one way to pronounce words? How can teachers assess speech in a multicultural classroom?