“PROBLEMS IN PRONUNCIATION THAT THE NON-NATIVE
SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH ENCOUNTER.”
Ch. Venkatesham
Assistant Professor of English
CBIT,Hyderabad.
Abstract:
Language has a very important social purpose, because, it is mainly used for linguistic
communication. A language is used for two ways for the purpose of communication. It can be
spoken or written. The medium of speech is more important than the medium of writing. This
is because speech comes first in the history of any language community. We started speaking
long before we started writing. It is also understood how the speaker can pronounce flawlessly.
So it is important to learn pronunciation which can be acquired through practice. But even
there are several problems in the way of learning pronunciation.
Correct pronunciation is important and soul to any language through which we convey the
ideas to other persons to understand it correctly. Teaching pronunciation is an important area of
language teaching in the EFL/ESL classroom that many English teachers avoid. Though there
are a number of text books and instructional manuals available on the theories and
methodology of language teaching, there is comparatively little on teaching pronunciation. As
teaching pronunciation is being neglected in the classrooms of EFL/ESL learners, the students
are unable to utter the simplest words in a correct way. It is found in several educational
institutions in India and especially in Andhra Pradesh. The reason behind this is generally the
disinterested teachers and the students altogether.
Introduction:
Teaching pronunciation involves a number of challenges. To begin with, teachers often tend to
observe that they do not have enough time in class to give proper attention to this aspect of
English instruction. Whenever they find the time to deal with pronunciation, the instruction
often results to the presentation and practice of a series of tedious and apparently distinct
topics. To practice sounds over and over again (e.g., minimal pairs like chip and cheap; ran and
rain; neck and knock etc.,) frequently leads to discouraging outcomes, and discouraged learners
and teachers end up wanting to shun pronunciation on the whole. There are also psychological
factors that affect the learning of pronunciation in ways that are not so true of studying
grammar or vocabulary. For one thing, the most basic elements of speaking are deeply
personal. Our sense of self and community are bound up in the speech-rhythms of our first
language (L1). These rhythms were learned in the first year of life and are deeply rooted in the
minds of students. Therefore, it is common for students to feel uneasy when they hear
themselves speak with the rhythm of a second language (L2). They find that they “sound
foreign” to themselves, and this is troubling for them. Although the uneasiness is usually
unconscious, it can be a major barrier to improve intelligibility in the L2. A teacher can help
overcome this psychological barrier and other challenges by thinking of the goal of
pronunciation instruction not as helping students to sound like native speakers but as helping
them to learn the core elements of spoken English so that they can be easily understood by
others. After all, English pronunciation does not amount to mastery of a list of sounds or
isolated words. Instead, it amounts in learning and practicing the specifically English way of
making a speaker’s thoughts easy to follow. The approach addresses the individual elements of
pronunciation but always within the framework of a larger system that uses all these individual
elements to make speakers’ ideas clear and understandable to their listeners. It is a known fact
that the soul of any language is correct pronunciation. It lies in the knowledge of the speaker in
pronouncing the sounds represented correctly.
Objectives:
The main aim of the research is to find out the truth which is hidden and which has not been
discovered yet. Though each research study has its own specific purpose, we may think of
research objectives as falling into a number of following broad groupings:
The main objectives of this paper are:
1. To gain familiarity with a phenomenon or to achieve new insights into it.
2. To portray accurately the distinctiveness of a particular individual, situation or a
group.
3. To identify the possible ways in which teaching of pronunciation can be made
interesting
and effective.
4. To give the importance of using methods in teaching pronunciation in the classroom.
5. Finally, to provide useful guidelines to the facilitators to use the latest approaches in a
customized manner, without making it complicated for the learners of EFL/ESL classes.
Discussion:
Morley (1991) rightly said, “It is essential to teach pronunciation in the ESL/EFL classroom.”
Though it is an essential area of study, still it is not given much priority in the classrooms of
EFL/ESL settings. Though there is an idea view behind designing the course pertaining to
teaching of pronunciation in the universities to be implemented in the concerned colleges, it is
not taken seriously when it comes onto the platform. The teaching of pronunciation is
neglected in spite of its essentiality. This pronunciation teaching is still an elective course in
the curriculum of post graduation. But it must be a common syllabus of all branches of
education.
According to Lin, Fan “some teachers argue that pronunciation is not important at all, for very
few tests would require students to show abilities related to pronunciation” But as a language
teacher we should emphasis this essentiality of teaching pronunciation as it is an integral part
of language learning. It is the facilitator who usually makes the students to do well with
pronunciation. In the way they may face several problems related to pronunciation. The
problems may be,
1. Mother tongue influence.
2. Untrained teachers.
3. Lack of required infrastructure.
Mother tongue influence
Though there is consonantal sound in Telugu language like voiced palate- alveolar fricative /d /
as in the word ‘judge’ /d3 d3/, there is no voiced velar fricative /3/ as in the words like
pleasure, measure, leisure etc. which they pronounce like /plez /, /mez /, /lez / etc, instead of
/ple3 /, /me3 /, and le3 / respectively. The unvoiced labio-dental affricate /f/ as in the word like
‘food’, pronounced as /fu:d/, the students of telugu as mother tongue pronounce as /phu:d/ as if
which is a retroflex / ph / which is not among the English consonant sounds.
The vowel sound / x / is not there in the Telugu vowel sounds. In the word like man, the
students pronounce it like / mjxn / instead of /mxn /. The diphthongs of English are not found
in Telugu vowel sounds. We do not have an extended /e/ sound in English. If it is table which
is to be pronounced as /teibl/ but the students pronounce it as an extended /e/ sound. The
English nouns and verbs ending in voiceless consonants like /p/, /t/ and /k/ form their plurals
followed by a sibilant /s/.. If the words ending in voiced consonants like /b/, /d/ and /g/ form
their plurals followed by a /z/ sound. But in Telugu consonants, to form plurals always a
sibilant /s/ is added whether the word ending in a voiced or voiceless consonant sound. It is
mainly due to the influence of mother tongue.
The learners of a foreign language usually make mistakes in pronouncing correctly the sounds
of their target language. They are mainly swept in the flood of the influence of their mother
tongue. The students often find difficulty in pronouncing a particular sound in their curricular
activities. For example, the Telugu students learning English have no knowledge of certain
vowel as well as consonant sounds in English. Hence, they pronounce such sounds according
to the sounds of their mother tongue. The influence may be in,
1. The English Alphabet
2. Sounds and Letters of Vowels
1. The English Alphabet
Teachers usually assume that the students already “know” the alphabet. In fact, if you come
from a different alphabet background – such as Telugu, where for instance the letter /Z/ comes
early in the alphabet instead of at the end – using a dictionary is frustrating. Furthermore,
people who have difficulty being understood need a quick way to repair a communication
breakdown. Spelling the focus word out loud can be a big help, but only if the learner can use
the alphabet with ease. It is worth taking time to work with the names of the letters because,
aside from helping to decode print, spelling aloud is a good way to correct a communication
breakdown. The problem is that both teachers and students tend to think that they have
adequately covered the alphabet on the first day of study of a new language; and nothing more
needs to be done about it. Aside from a few typical problem consonants, the names of the
vowel letters are the most commonly confused. This makes a serious problem for decoding
written English, because of the complexity of vowel spellings in this language.
Vowel Sounds and Vowel Letters
Students need to learn how to pronounce vowel sounds accurately, and how to decode the letter
spellings. Starting from this premise, how best should vowels be presented? First of all,
students need to really know how to pronounce the vowel letters as presented in the alphabet:
the “alphabet names.” This is an especially challenging task for students whose L1 uses a
Telugu alphabet, but pronounces the letters differently. It is customary to teach vowel sounds
through comparing pairs of sounds that are physically close in articulatory placement (e.g.,
ship/sheep). But it may be more efficient to teach these vowel sounds according to the usual
ways each vowel letter is pronounced. Most of the English vowel sounds can be divided into
two basic categories. The first question is how to describe these decoding categories so that the
distinction can be easily grasped. Traditionally, spelling books have described these sound
pairs as short and long. For instance, the -a- in mat is described as short, while the -a- in mate
is described as long. This terminology may be useful for teaching reading to native speakers of
English, but there are several problems with using these terms with English learners. Leading
pronunciation textbooks do not use these terms for vowel quality but reserve them for actual
duration of vowel sounds (Dauer 1993, Gilbert 2005, Grant 2001, Miller 2000, Morley 1992).
Here are some reasons why the terms are not really helpful for L2 learners:
For people new to English find that the terms are not spontaneous. Because teachers are used to
the concept, they assume that it is easy. But actually short and long vowels are no more
spontaneously obvious to students of English than the terms soft and hard are as names for
consonants, for beginning students of Telugu.
The most serious objection in using these terms for the distinction between the two vowel
categories is that if short and long are used this way, it tends to weaken the meaning of these
terms when used to describe the actual duration contrasts which are essential to the English
system of stress. Lengthening for stress is important for literacy, as well as intelligibility and
listening comprehension, so it would be better to use entirely different terms to describe the
vowel contrast in a pair like mat/mate. If not long/short, what terms might be preferable?
The vowel sounds in a peak syllable are crucial. Other parts of the thought group can be
muffled, but the vowel sound at the center of the peak syllable needs to be extra long and extra
clear. Part of achieving the necessary clarity of this vowel involves pronouncing it with the
correct sound. But pronouncing vowels with the correct sound is often difficult for learners.
Deciding how to pronounce the vowels in an English word based on spelling can be especially
challenging. Students need practical rules to help them guess how printed words should be
pronounced. This is an essential early skill because it enables learners to use printed material to
read aloud on their own and to practice what they have been taught in class.
Accurate vowel sounds are harder to learn than consonants probably because the tongue has no
touching points to anchor them. Vowels are pronounced with the various parts of the tongue
moving in open space to speak. On the other hand, with consonants, parts of the tongue
constantly touch somewhere. This distinction between vowels and consonants may be why
consonants are to be mastered more efficiently through speaking tasks, whereas introduction to
vowel distinctions may be more efficiently accomplished through listening tasks (Fucci et al.
1977, Leather 1983, Chun 2002).
2. Untrained teachers.
A teacher is a right guide to the students in moulding their career in a measured way. If the
teacher is efficient, the students can learn effectively. But it is unfortunate to have the teachers
who are not showing interest in training them to pronounce correctly. Some teachers do not
have the knowledge of the foreign sounds leads to inability to teach the students the right
pronunciation. They pronounce the words like ‘depot’ as / dipot / instead of /depo / or /di:po /,
debut as / debut / instead of /deibju: /. The way they pronounce indicates that the teachers have
not acquired the correct linguistic equipment, pronunciation in particular. S o the students also
follow the same erroneous pronunciation.
When teachers focus on pronunciation practice many of them make the mistake of trying to
teach pronunciation along with introducing vocabulary. This can be useful to the students who
have good listening skills or who perhaps speak a related language. This brings us back to the
question of whether pronunciation can be effectively taught. The answer can be yes, of course
it can be taught, and it is just that the way many books tell us to teach it is actually one of the
least effective. Most textbooks will have you drill pronunciation with repetitive of the
vocabulary. Some of the better ones will have you work on it with spelling, which is an
important skill, especially in English with its many irregularities and exceptions. Very few will
start you and your students where you need to start, however, and that is at the level of the
phoneme.
3. Lack of required infrastructure.
The students of EFL/ESL utter some sounds differently. It is required to have a suitable
infrastructure needed. Now no such infrastructure related to language is in a full pledged way
in most of the engineering colleges. Hence the students are pronouncing erroneously. The
teacher is required to teach the students the two articulators (active and passive) in the
production of sounds. Then only they will understand how pronounce a particular word
correctly with the help of language lab.
Knowledge of correct pronunciation is essential pre-requisite for a learner as well as a teacher.
In this way a student can overcome the barriers in pronunciation with the help of a well trained
teacher with a well equipped language lab.
Methodology:
An intense view at the present trends in the field of teaching pronunciation would help us to
customize our approach on how to move to handle the variety of pronunciation in different
parts of the world making ourselves to come across even as we handle various curriculum
settings.
Morley (1991) rightly said, “It is essential to teach pronunciation in the ESL/EFL classroom.”
Without a sufficient, threshold-level mastery of the English pronunciation students’
intelligibility and listening comprehension will not move on, even much effort is put repeating
each sound. Hence the important must be given to rhythm and melody in whatever time is
available for teaching pronunciation. If there is more time, then other lower important topics
can be addressed (e.g., the sound of the letters, the difference between the sounds associated
with r and l, etc.), teachers hesitate to tackle rhythm and melody in class because these topics
are perceived as complicated.
The following methods /techniques may be used to teach the students for effective learning of
L1 pronunciation. They may be;
Pronouncing the individual sounds, collecting the ideas, separation of word endings, chain
stories, dialogues, minimal pairs, mirror practice, rhyming words, tongue twisters, stress and
rhythm, content and function words, intonation and pictorial representations.
The learners are advised to practice a group of words like a phrase or sentence by repeating the
last word, then adding another word with each repetition till the whole sentence or phrase has
been produced.
Collecting the ideas from the students to think of words on a topic that is decided. Ask all the
students to practice the words repeatedly. The learners may be advised to place the words in
columns according to the sounds they practice. Eg; words ending in –ed,-st, etc,.
An overall idea is given to the students on topic and is asked to contribute sentences related to
the story or idea by narrating chain stories. Dialogues are also will be very helpful to the
students to write the words that they practice. The learners are advised to learn the minimal
pairs to speech practice, indicate whether the two words spoken are the same or different, or
which word in a list is different. Mirror practice like observing the movements of the organs of
speech while uttering the word. Rhyming words also help the learners immensely. It may be
advised the learners to create lists of rhyming words containing the same sound being
practiced. The facilitator may give few tongue twisters to practice the target sounds. Eg: “I saw
a saw such a saw I never saw.”, “She sells seashells by the seashore.” Stress and rhythm play
an important role to learn the appropriate pronunciation. The students may be asked to change
the meanings by reading the words and phrases using contrastive stress and discuss the
meanings. Eg: green house and greenhouse. Segregation of content and structure words can
also be a good practice to learn effective pronunciation.
Vowel/consonant symbols and keywords:
Vowel sounds
Consonant sounds
Symbol Keywords
Symbol Keywords
/a/
at, cap, parrot
/b/
bed, table, rob
/ā/
ape, play, sail
/d/
dog, middle, sad
/ä/
cot, father, heart
/f/
for, phone, cough
/e/
ten, wealth, merry
/g/
get, wiggle, dog
/ē/
even, feet, money
/h/
hat, hope, ahead
/i/
is, stick, mirror
/hw/
which, white
/ī/
ice, high, sky
/j/
joy, badge, agent
/ō/
go, open, tone
/k/
kill, cat, quiet
/ô/
all, law, horn
/l/
let, yellow, ball
could, look, pull
/m/
meet, number, time
cure, furious
n
net, candle, ton
boot, crew, tune
/p/
put, sample, escape
/y/
cute, few, use
/r/
red, wrong, born
/oi/
boy, oil, royal
/s/
sit, castle, office
/ou/
cow, out, sour
/t/
top, letter, cat
/u/
mud, ton, blood, trouble
/v/
voice, every, love
/u/
her, sir, word
/w/
wet, always, quart
/ə/
ago, agent, collect, focus
/y/
yes, canyon, onion
/'l/
cattle, paddle
/z/
zoo, misery, rise
/'n/
sudden, sweeten
/ts/
chew, nature, punch
/y/
shell, machine, bush
thin, nothing, truth
then, other, bathe
beige, measure, seizure
ring, anger, drink
Finally, the students are advised to read the sentences with different stress and intonation to
change the meaning. It is worthy to practice sounds with pictorial representations like the
organs of speech (lips, tongue, alveolar ridge, palatal and so on.)
Organs of speech
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Conclusion:
Pronunciation certainly requires enough attention in the English class, especially in classes
with a communicative approach. Poor pronunciation will cause problems in oral
communication no matter how good a speaker’s control of English grammar and vocabulary
might be. Many of the problems, in fact, are caused by the influence of the speaker’s mother
tongue; Telugu students use Telugu speech patterns or styles when speaking English.
Therefore, English teachers need to help students be aware of this in order to be able to speak
English clearly and intelligently.
Finally, we want to encourage EFL teachers to have more confidence in teaching English
pronunciation even though we are not native speakers of English. With full advanced
preparation, including practicing our own pronunciation and designing effective teaching
activities, we can all be experts in teaching English pronunciation.
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