Areas of a native speaker knowledge

2.1.1. Sounds

2.1.2. Stress

2.1.3. Intonation

2.2. Grammar

2.3. Vocabulary

2.4. Discourse

2.4.1. Appropriateness

2.4.1.1. Communicative

competence

2.4.1.2. Interaction with context

2.4.1.3. Structuring discourse

2.4.2. Global communicative competence

2.5. Language skills

2.5.1. Skills and sub-skills

2.6. Conclusions

Pronunciation

Native speakers or competent users of the language know how to say a word. This knowledge is made up of three main areas: sounds, stress and intonation.

Sounds

If we consider the spoken language, it will be obvious that it is made up of sounds. On their own the sounds of a language may well be meaningless. If we say [t] a few times, e.g., ‘tu, tu, tu’ it will not mean very much in English. Neither will the sounds [k], [æ ] or [s]. But if we put all these sounds together in a certain order we end up with the word ‘cats’ and that does mean something.

All words are made up of sounds like this. Speakers of a language need to know these sounds if they are to understand what is said to them and be understood in their turn. Some of the problems that speakers of English as a foreign language have are precisely because they have difficulty with individual sounds. They cannot reproduce the correct sounds. E.g.: the Spanish speaker who says ‘ bery’ instead of ‘very’ or the Japanese speaker who says a word which sounds like ‘light’ instead of the intended ‘right’, or the Russian speaker who says ‘sanks’ meaning ‘thanks’. The native speaker of English, however, will not make these mistakes for he knows what the sounds of English are and he knows how they are put together. There are two other sides of the spoken language that the native speaker knows about. They are stress and intonation.

Stress

When they use a word, native speakers know which part of that word should receive the heaviest emphasis. For example, in the word ‘photograph’ not all the parts are of equal importance. We can divide he word into three parts: pho-to-graph. Competent speakers of the language will say the word stressing the first syllable. The situation changes with the word ‘pho to grapher’ where the stress shifts to the second syllable. Stress in words also changes depending on the word’s grammatical function: per mit is a verb, but per mit is a noun. And the same is true of the words im port and im port.

The changing use of stress in sentences is also one of the areas of knowledge that competent language speakers have. For example, if I say ‘ I can run ’ I am probably only talking about my ability to run. But if I say ‘ I can run’ I am probably stressing the word ‘can’ because somebody is suggesting that I am not able to run and I am strongly denying it. In the same way if someone said to you ‘Is this your pen cil? ’ it might well be a simple question with no hidden meaning. But if the same person said ‘Is this your pencil? ’ this might suggest that there was something very surprising about your ownership of the pencil.

Native speakers of the language unconsciously know about stress and how it works. They know which syllables of words are stressed and they know how to use stress to change the meaning of phrases.