The Problems of Oral Production of Speech Sounds in the Teaching and Learning of English Grammar

The work is principally concerned with the problems of oral production of speech sounds in the teaching and learning of English Grammar. Obviously, there are phonological rules that guide the oral production of speech sounds just as there are grammatical rules that guide the formation of words and sentences. It is absolutely necessary to examine how the oral production of speech sounds affects the teaching and learning of English Grammar. This, therefore, accounts for the much attention given to the pronunciation principles in this research work. Ordinarily, it would have been better for words to be pronounced the way they are spelt and written, but this is not always the case. Phonemic transcription brings out clearly the correct pronunciation of the word and the correct pronunciation goes a long way to provide the clue for the proper classification of the word. This fact is clearly illustrated in such words as “record”, “rebel”, “import” and a number of other words which have dual membership, meaning and function. Therefore, the correct pronunciation of such words will help the learner to understand the parts of speech to which a word belongs and the function it performs. There are words that look alike and are similar in spellings, but it is through correct pronunciation of these words that they can be classified in terms of function and meaning. Sentences, of course, have distinguishing features, according to their types and the correct oral presentation of the sentences projects the type, function and structure easily. The implications of correct pronunciation in the teaching and learning of English grammar is therefore, very important for fruitful grammatical studies