I.2. Conscious Approach

The teacher and the learner of Phonetics shouldn't ignore the fact that a conscious approach to its study is the only correct way to perfect pronunciation habits. It means that the process of mere imitation is of no use. “It may be said that, as we grow older, the acquisition of a new language will normally entail a great deal of conscious, analytical effort, instead of the child’s ready and facile imitation” (p.3). ⁶ The rules of psychology say, that if the learner doesn't know the exact mechanisms of producing a sound, a rhythmic model, a pitch contour or the mechanism of forming the assimilation cluster, it will be impossible to reproduce them in a proper way.

If you learn, for example, a particular phoneme of English, you are to know the whole spectrum of things: its place in the phonemic system of the language, its distinctive features, its allophonic family, the rules of its combining with the neighbouring sounds or the overlapping of articulations in the production of sound sequences, the exact mechanisms of articulation, etc. The student is to learn characterizing every sound in accordance with the phonetic transcription.

Thus Conscious approach is the only necessary means of studying such an important part of Linguistics as Phonetics.

I.3. Some principal differences between Russian and English articulation.

The basis of articulation is to be very important in foreign-language teaching: “…better results are achieved when the learner gets the basis of articulation right rather than trying for the foreign sound sequences from the basis of his own language” (p.289 Phonetics I.D. O'Connor 1978). We are to know the differences in tension, in tongue shape, in pressure of the articulators, in lip and cheek and jaw posture and movement, which run through the whole articulatory process.

The student should mind some principal differences between Russian (R) and English (E) articulation.

I. R: Dorsal pronunciation manner is peculiar for Russian articulatory basis. A Latin word "dorβum" (the upper area of the tongue) means for us a specific position of the tongue in the pronunciation of all Russian forelingual consonants /т, д, с, з …etc./, articulated with the concave relationship of the tongue body with the roof of the mouth.

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