Oral English- Theoretical Orientation

Oral English is otherwise called Spoken English. This concept is based on the phoneme theory. First of all let us define a phoneme.What is a phoneme? Phonologically speaking ,the phoneme is the smallest distinctive unit of sound. In other words sound units are called phonemes. They are distinctive and this is one major characteristic that phonemes have.What do we mean when we say that phonemes are distinctive? This means that phonemes are reciprocally exclusive.

This means that two different phonemes cannot occur in the same linguistic environment.For example in the word 'bed' the medial vowel sound is \e\ and it is distinctive. It remains \e\ and any attempt to replace it with another phoneme and still retain the original meaning of the word 'bed' is impossible.Once another phoneme is used to replace the phoneme in the original word, in this case 'bed', the meaning of the word automatically changes. This is the main characteristic of phonemes and students and undergraduates in universities must study this theory very well to grasp the total message.Oral English is fundamental to the study of English Language and this is why some examining bodies like NECO and WAEC have made Oral English a compulsory part of their English Language examination.