EFL teaching at university level: creating a "bridge" between grammar and phonology

Mendoza

Congreso; 41º Congreso Internacional de Lingüística Sistémico-Funcional y del X Congreso Regional de Lingüística Sistémico-Funcional- expositora; 2014

Universidad Nacional de Cuyo

After completing a five year programme of studies, students at the School of Languages, National University of Córdoba, become EFL teachers or translators. English Phonetics and Phonology and English Grammar are included in the curriculum as different annual subjects, taught by different teachers, during the first, second and third year of the programme of studies. Most students seem to consider these subjects as two different ?compartments? of the English language. Our aim is to help students to integrate theory with practice and to find connections with other subjects. Being English phonetics teachers, our concern has resulted in a series of changes in the oral practice carried out by students in the context of the subject Phonetics and Phonology II (third year) so as to make explicit reference to the content of English Grammar II syllabus (also third year), whenever possible. We must point out that while English Grammar II syllabus is SFL oriented, Phonetics and Phonology II syllabus is not. This paper presents a pedagogical proposal which resorts to the systems of tonality, tonicity and tone and oral paragraphing (Tench, 1996; Wells, 2006) to try to integrate the subjects English Grammar II and English Phonetics and Phonology II. The text selected for this paper forms part of the practice material used by our students to carry out activities such as communicative reading aloud and oral presentations (Brazil, 1997). First, we will briefly refer to how we deal with the phonological components included in the course. Then, we will describe the way in which students are encouraged to pay attention to aspects such as theme, focus, organization of information units, information status and cohesion. That is, we will focus on textual and interpersonal meanings (Halliday and Greaves, 2008).