This course provides students awareness on language sounds and structures. The students will learn how and where speech sounds are articulated in terms of place, manner and voice. They will also identify sound structures and their relationship to meaning and grammatical forms. Students will learn to transcribe English sounds using the IPA. Finally, students will also be exposed to phonological variations and evaluate them in different speech contexts.

Module 1 enables students to identify the production and process of speech sounds as well as the relationship between sounds, meaning and grammatical forms in utterances. Module 2 introduces the IPA (i.e., the written symbols used for transcribing the sounds of world languages) to students so that they are able to read and write the IPA transcription at the very least, for the English language. Students should also learn to differentiate between broad and narrow transcription, accent and regional dialects. Module 3 introduces students to phonological variations such as the syllabic structure of English words, word stress, intonation, pitch, force of utterance, tempo and timbre. Students will also be introduced to intonational styles in different speech contexts such as informational, academic (scientific), publicistic (oratorial), declamatory (artistic), conversational (familiar).