Abstract:
Even if there is a natural continuity in the study of the elements of phonetics, which starts from the period of learning to read and write and continues in the gymnasium, the students show poor knowledge regarding the phonological system of the Romanian language. They often confuse the notions of letter - sound, they fail to distinguish the typical sounds from the structure of words, they encounter difficulties in dividing some words into syllables and in identifying the stressed syllable, but, above all, they cannot explain the correspondence between the graphematic and the phonemic composition of the words. The complexity and difficulty of this problem is amplified by the rendering of some phonemes by different letters or by groups of letters and different phonetic values that several letters of the Romanian alphabet have, even if the writing in Romanian is phonologically specific. The article refers to some of the mentioned aspects and proposes some suggestions regarding the efficiency of the teaching-learning process of phonetics and, in particular, the correspondence between phoneme - letter, letter – phoneme in the Romanian language.