How to overcome the challenges of oral English (TEXT OF ORAL)

The first thing you must know is that some sounds found in s language may not be seen in another language. In that case, the study of speech sounds (phonology) is a language of specific.

More than 500 letters are representing the 44 sounds in English which means, what you see in a language is not what you pronounce, therefore, spellings doesn’t matter.

We should all know that phonology is a wide topic that needs more explanation. In that case we will explain the details of it in our subsequent chapters.

Our focus here is to know what comprises oral in English when it comes to answering it in WAEC OR ANY EXTERNAL EXAMINATION.

Oral English comprises sections, and there are several questions under each section in which you must attempt correctly if you intend to succeed in the subject.

Consonant and vowel sounds

In these sections, there are 24 consonant sounds. Although all this sounds may not be given its section, some will still be presented, it is better we study and understand the whole. Attempting consonant sounds won't give much stress to the students if they study well but an unprepared student will find it difficult to understand the simplest of the questions.\

Vowel sounds

You have seen that A E I O U are vowels while others between A and Z are consonants.

These are just letters not sounds. There are many sounds called monothongs and diphthongs. Monothongs are 12 altogether and diphthongs are 8. 5 vowel letters produce 20 vowel sounds. Monothongs are symbols that represent only one vowel sounds while diphthongs have two sounds which have been joined together as they are pronounced. You will notice that the first of the two sounds will gain more loudness than the other. For example: /ei/ sounds as in DAY, RAY. More examples will be listed in our later topics on sounds.

Stress in English

Stress cannot be described without first discussing the syllable. Therefore, a syllable may be defined as part of a word that can be produced at one heart-beat. A word may have one syllable (monosyllable) or two syllables (bisyllable) or more than two syllables (polysyllable). As for stress, when there is a bisyllable, one syllable will be pronounced louder than the other. This means to determine the stress,  we need the syllables and its division. For example, tailor. First, determine the placement of the syllables, i.e tai-lor. Then check which of the two is louder. In this case, the word ' tai' is louder than the 'lor'. So it can be written as TAI -lor. I hope you get it?

Now, while answering the questions on stress; you can determine the stress through the nature of the word (part of speech) and some defined rules governing the usage of affixation. For example, the position of stress in the word COMPILE is different from the one in COMPILATION.

Rhyming words

In this section, you will be asked to choose the word that rhymes with the given word. An example is this:

Clone (a) crown (b) loan (c)brown (d)lawn.

In this case,   you have to check through the beginning sound, the mid and the last sound of the words. So if we look at the above sample, what do you think the answer will be? Huh... Yes the answer is C =loan, because clone rhyme with loan. I hope you get it?

Word stress questions

You may be asked to identify where the stress falls - in all the syllables that constitute a word. You should which syllable is stressed, for example,  examiNAtion.

Contrastive stress question

You may be given different statements/questions and emphasis will be placed on different aspects of what that statement is about, for example, I SAW the thief yesterday.

Meaning: SAW is stressed, it shows that I did not hear the rumour, but actually saw him.
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