The Importance Of Teaching Phonetics For Developing Communication Skills

Abstract

Speech is the most important means or medium of human communication. The signifigance of speech is self-evident in that it is hard to imagine life without speech. Unfortunately, the moments when we become aware of speech often relate to problems and disorders in speech communication: we may experience voice problems and, occasionally, difficulties even in the production of certain speech sounds and also hearing problems may have an effect on our ability to understand speech. Phonetics is the science where all aspects of speech are considered and investigated: how speech is produced using our speech organs, what are the properties of speech sounds in the air as they travel from the speaker's mouth to the ear of the listener, and, finally, how we perceive speech and recognise its structural elements as certain linguistic symbols or signs.