Phonology
Phonology is the study of how speech sounds function in a context—in a syllable, a word, a sentence, or a language as a whole. It examines how speech sounds are organized in the human mind and used to convey meaning. The speech sounds studied are called phonemes which are meaningfully different sound units in a language or simply put the smallest units of sound. For example, ‘pat’ and ‘bat’ differ in their first phoneme—the “p” and “b”.
Method of Teaching
A 7th grade civics teacher starts a lesson about the bill of rights by reading out loud to the class from a passage of their textbook that's displayed on the overhead projector for all the students to see. Next, students follow along while the teacher reads using a pen or pencil to point to each word as it is read. After reading, the teacher goes back over the passage to highlight any important and challenging new vocabulary words.
Next, the teacher says each new vocabulary word aloud and asks students to guess how many phonemes they think are in each of the highlighted vocabulary words. Finally, the teacher identifies each phoneme of the word by underlining it for everyone else to see on the overhead projector.
